“That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!”

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

I wish I had never been born–there or anywhere else.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.

You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual.

Life is a metaphysical autumn, with time it changes the color of life and fall, but always has an aura of change and depth.

His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Two monks sit facing, playing chess on the mountain, The bamboo shadow on the board is dark and clear. Not a person sees the bamboo’s shadow, One sometimes hears the pieces being moved.

Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.

A strip of water’s spread in the setting sun, Half the river’s emerald, half is red. I love the third night of the ninth month, The dew is like a pearl; the moon like a bow.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.