I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.
The peace and beauty of a spring day had descended upon the earth like a benediction.
Goodbye -- Because I love you.
Madame Ratignolle hoped that Robert would exercise extreme caution in dealing with the Mexicans, who, she considered, were a treacherous people, unscrupulous and revengeful. She trusted she did them no injustice in thus condemning them as a race. She had known personally but one Mexican, who made and sold excellent tamales, and whom she would have trusted implicitly, so soft-spoken was he. One day he was arrested for stabbing his wife. She never knew whether he had been hanged or not.
She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom.
A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled, down, down to the water
…there would be no powerful will binding hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature…And yet she had loved him- sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being.
Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.
Poverty is a national waste as well as individual waste. We are all diminished when any of us are denied proper education. The nation is the poorer - a poorer economy, a poorer civilization, because of this human and national waste.
There is none of you but will hang me, I know, whenever you can clinch me within your power.
God gives us the vision, then he takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of the vision, and it is in the valley that so many of us faint and give way. Every vision will be made real if we will have patience.