I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you’ve been doing. It’s a hundred years since we’ve met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.
It’s you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I’d looked at so long that I’d ceased to see them.
It was too late for happiness – but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on – don’t take it from me now.
There’s nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.
Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.
The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.
I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
I shan’t be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I’m like a child going at night into a room where there’s always a light.
He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.
How I hate everything!
In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.
Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
To know when to be generous and when firm – that is wisdom.
The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel’s conclusiveness – too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes – she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.