I hate the word proper. If you tell me a thing is not proper, I immediately feel the most rabid desire to go ‘neck and heels’ into it.
Nowhere more than in New York does the contest between squalor and splendor so sharply present itself.
Experience is an excellent doctor, though he never had a diploma.
Oh! to be a child again. My only treasures, bits of shell and stone and glass. To love nothing but maple sugar. To fear nothing but a big dog. To go to sleep without dreading the morrow. To wake up with a shout. Not to have seen a dead face. Not to dread a living one. To be able to believe.
No crust so tough as the grudged bread of dependence.
Pity that gold should always bring with it the canker – covetousness.
I dare say you will try to make me believe that Editors are human. Now I deny that, for I myself have, in past days, had evidence to the contrary.
When a literary person’s exhaustive work is over, the last thing he wishes to do is to talk books.
Everything in the country, animate and inanimate, seems to whisper, be serene, be kind, be happy. We grow tolerant there unconsciously.
Hotel life is about the same in every latitude.
Fitz Allen had ‘traveled;’ and that is generally understood to mean to go abroad and remain a period of time long enough to grow a fierce beard, and fierce mustache, and cultivate a thorough contempt for everything in your own country.
It is the most astonishing thing that persons who have not sufficient education to spell correctly, to punctuate properly, to place capital letters in the right places, should, when other means of support fail, send mss. for publication.
Blessed be sleep! We are all young then; we are all happy. Then our dead are living.
O, girls! set your affections on cats, poodles, parrots or lap-dogs; but let matrimony alone. It’s the hardest way on earth to getting a living.
The cream of enjoyment in this life is always impromptu. The chance walk; the unexpected visit; the unpremeditated journey; the unsought conversation or acquaintance.
One person is as good as another in New England, and better, too.
Why will parents use that expression? What right have you to have a favorite child?
To the Pilgrim Mothers, who not only had their full share of the hardships and privations of pioneer life but also had the Pilgrim Fathers to endure.
Dear reader, true religion is not gloomy.
There are no little things. Little things are the hinges of the universe.
Never compel yourself to say words to which the heart yields no response.