Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful--the formation of fixed ...habits of work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-c...arrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is ...backward in the growth of progress ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep, ...and to study; its extremes of squalor and of splendor do not stimulate, but sadden me; certain phases of its society I profoundly value, but would sacrifice them to the heaven of country quiet, if I had to choose between.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography w...hich marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one's notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one's dearest readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe in women; and in their right to their own best possibilities in every department of life. I believe that the methods of ...dress practiced among women are a marked hindrance to the realization of these possibilities, and should be scorned or persuaded out of society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... it seems to have been my luck to stumble into various forms of progress, to which I have been of the smallest possible use; ye...t for whose sake I have suffered the discomfort attending all action in moral improvements, without the happiness of knowing that this was clearly quite worth while.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is come...dy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »