If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous. Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up. She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another. Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand. Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love. But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.