I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.

Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.

The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?

. . . if there was a hope of comfort for any moment, the heart or head of no human being in this house could yield it . . .

This little man was of the order of beings who must not be opposed, unless you possessed an all-dominant force sufficient to crush him at once.

The world, I soon learned, held a different estimate: and I make no doubt, the world is very right in its view, yet believe also that I am not quite wrong in mine.

Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.

In catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.

I've always believed that a person is smart. It's people that are stupid.

Poverty's simplicity has an inexpensive beauty rooted in it, which the rich can never afford to buy

Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.

The right response to the non-problem of global warming is to have the courage to do nothing.

The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism.

I think, for me, I have to remember that I'm telling a story in some way.

The moment has no time.

Though very poor, may still be very blest.