[Finishing schools] are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, "Into how little space a human being can be crushed?" I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move . . ."

"Everything has two sides --the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn."

"We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest --blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us."

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

"The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off . . . you will see the scar there still."