“It was a compound of self-reliance, hard knocks, heart hunger, unceasing work, and generosity. There was no form of suffering with which the girl could not sympathize, no work she was afraid to attempt, no subject she had investigated she did not understand. These things combined to produce a breadth and depth of character altogether unusual.”

“If you’re not afraid of working hard, self-reliance comes easy!”

“She worked to live; then, also to live, for the heart too has its hunger, she loved.”

“There is such a thing as looking through a person's eyes into the heart, and learning more of the height, and breadth, and depth of another's soul in one hour than it might take you a lifetime to discover, if he or she were not disposed to reveal it, or if you had not the sense to understand it.”

“She had stayed home and worked hard and a posthumous recognition had eventually followed. Not that Buck hadn't worked hard, sure he did, but in the end the body won't hold up as a work of art.”

“Mosca had been so busy working the oars of her little plan that she had failed to see the iceberg upon which it was doomed to founder. And now here it was in front of her, a towering glacial mountain of selfishness, and she could not understand how she could have missed it. How vast was it? How far beneath the surface did it go?”