In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness. - Sarah Orne Jewett

You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society... In short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself... To work in silence and with all one's heart, that is the writer's lot; he is the only artist who must be a solitary, and yet needs the widest outlook upon the world.

Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.