If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land..

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of ….

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea..

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks..

The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped sh….

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text..

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she sho….

Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity..

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine..

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history..

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this….

The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as ….

I have lived too long in foreign parts.

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything..

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize..

Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins..

Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare..

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wic….

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry..

...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything..

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process..