I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air. or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness;...

And I advise ye to think well, he told her It’s better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I’ve tried it both ways, and I know. A poor...

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

Her secret? It is every artist’s secret–passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.

As he stood there lost in reflection, Auclair thought he seemed more like a man revolving plans for a new struggle with fortune than one looking back upon a life of brilliant features. The Count...

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify – it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down...

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood...

What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Sometimes,” I ventured, “it doesn’t occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn’t stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were...

He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he...

Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious...

At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to...

After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which...

If words had cost money, Tom couldn’t have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer’s...

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.

Miracles… seem to me to rest not so much upon… healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see and...

By the time they had called at the baker’s and climbed to the top of Cap Diamant, the sun, dropping with incredible quickness, had already disappeared. They sat down in the blue twilight to eat...

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers

He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes;...

I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech...

Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even– a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure...

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of...

A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;A pungent odor from the dusty sage;A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;A breaking of the distant table-landsThrough purple mists ascending, and the flareOf water ditches silver in the...

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made...

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness.

Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.

Have the last word ma’m,” he said cheerfully. “It’s a lady’s privilege.

I only knew the schoolbooks said he “died in the wilderness, of a broken heart.””More than him has done that,” said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

The old man smiled. ‘I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.

But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keep enough to go over the line, to get itself with the work that is taken seriously, one has to have...

One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of...

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress [Mrs. Harling]. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They...

Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile.’I like that idea. It’s reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it means we can’t, after all, go so far afield as we might,’ he...

I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat...

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be ‘like Paris handsome and like Hector brave’.

The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try...

I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay...

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered– about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow...