In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.
In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits...
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where som...
America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.
Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing second, the gratification of one's family and friends and lastly, the solid cash.
Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.
It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to l...
Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl! whispered her mother. We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him
A forced smile is uglier than a frown.
Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!
How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed,...
Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind.
By all appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love, with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered b...
If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom...
We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed...