“Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.”

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!

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.