You won't be giving me away, father,' she had said before they went to church; 'you'll only be taking Aaron to be a son to you.
Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't cond...
What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.''He means to draw it out again, I suppose.
We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.
To most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable — else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?
There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than i...
There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity.
The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
That plain, middle-aged face, with a grave penetrating kindness in it, seeming to tell of a human being who had reached a firm, safe strand, but was looking with helpful pity towards the strugglers st...
So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that...
On both occasions Fred had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in...
Of course people need not be always talking well. Only one tells the quality of their minds when they try to talk well.
Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively Chri...
Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.
Maggie in her crude form, with her hair down her back, and altogether in a state of dubious promise, was a most undesirable niece; but now she was capable of being at once ornamental and useful.
Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed – that you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to...
It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that our former life has made for us -- the ties that have made oth...
In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was l...
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their...