“True love is a preview of heaven, and you do what you got to, to get it.”

“When a good man loves a good woman, God smiles. When a good man loves a good woman, God smiles so broad and bright that the angel guarding the gate to Eden puts down his fiery sword. I've been to busy to get to Eden. What kind of man is too busy to make God smile?”

“Love, Ada thought out on the lake that first spring afternoon, is largely a matter of paying attention and good timing.”

“Debt Chauffeur, that's my name for him now, wants to marry me. He asked me down on bended knee, and I would have been honored - except he wants us to live in London, and he wants me to live white. I crowed at that. I laughed so hard and not a tear came. He couldn't understand it. I don't often think on how white I look; it's always been a question of how colored I feel, and I feel plenty colored. He said that no one in London will know that I'm supposed to be colored. And I said I am colored, colored black, the way I talk, the way I cook, the way I do most everything, and he said but you don't have to be. ”

“God doesn't give a man anything more precious than a good woman.”

“Life plots elegantly.”

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”