“His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children.”

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

“Men may thus have several sorts of pleasures. The true pleasure is that for which they give up another.”

“One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery.”

“May I ask you if you have ever had an opportunity of remarking, down in your part of the country, that the children of not exactly suitable marriages are always most particularly anxious to be married?”

“Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.”