“I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors.There is so much aspiration in them,so much audacious hope and trembling fear,so much of the heart's history, that all errorsand shortcomings are for a while lost sight ofin the amiable self assertion of youth.”

“Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”

“God, youth is a terrible time! So much feeling and so little notion of how to handle it!”

“To me there is no more tragic sight than the average missionary. …We have given so much, yet not the one thing that counts; we aspire so high, and fall so low; we suffer so much, but so seldom with Christ; we have done so much and so little will remain; we have known Christ in part, and have so effectively barricaded our hearts against His mighty love, which surely He must yearn to give His disciples above all people.”

“No one has ever made me feel like this, no one. So much regret, so much loss, and so much desire all swirled together in my muddled brain. In my muddled heart.”

“Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.”