“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.”

“Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.”

“She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.”

“She was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.”

“Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.”

“There was money enough... but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would understand her- no one would pity her- and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid.”

“The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”