Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!”

“What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.”

“And who are you?" cried one agape, Shuddering in the gloaming light. "I know not" said the second Shape, "I only died last night.”

“I hope he and she that was Miss Wang Wang are very happy together, sitting cross-legged over dimenitive cups of tea in a sky-blue tower hung with bells.”

“Whenever a new scholar came to out school, I used to confront him at recess with the following words: 'My name's Tom Bailey: what's your name?' If the name struck me favorably, I shook hands with the new pupil cordially; but if it didn't I would turn on my heel, for I was particular in this point. Such names as Higgins, Wiggins, and Spriggins were deadly afronts to my ear; while Lapgdon, Wallace, Blake, and the like, were passing words to my confidence and esteem.”

“..We shall get on famously...and be capital friends forever.”

“So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.”

“...Conway would give me no rest until I fought him. I felt it was ordained ages before our birth that we should meet on this planet and fight.”

“..Fell over the prostrate steersman, and there we all lay in a heep, two or three of us quite picturesque with the nosebleed.”

“What a Babel of voices it was, everybody directing everybody else, and everybody doing everything wrong!”

“It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.”

“We visit...a neighboring grave-yard. I am by this time in a condition of mind to become a willing inmate of the place.”

“Then the ship gave sudden lurches that made it a matter of uncertainty whether one was going to put his fork in his mouth or into his eye.”

“What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.”