“At any rate the religious faith of the fifties as to which we were all children, young and old alike, it had one precious quality that it seems never likely to have again—it sufficed.”

Remembering an older faith chiefly for the completeness of assurance it gave believers · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Faith
• Memory
• Time

“I performed my part of this contract not wholly without pleasure in it, and I have no doubt that I owe to her my first taste for literature and the bent towards authorship which afterwards became a fixed line.”

Tracing her eventual vocation as a writer to an early influence on her reading · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Art
• Memory

“Home is a place that I never do get away from without immediately wishing myself back in it.”

A plain-spoken confession of her powerful attachment to home · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Love
• Memory

“During all my inland life at home and twenty-three years in the Australian bush, however happy I may have been, there was always that one thing wanting—the near neighbourhood, the salt breath of the sea.”

Describing a lifelong attachment to the sea that prosperity and happiness could not replace · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Joy
• Memory
• Nature

“There are books and ideas that can never suggest themselves without bringing it all to mind.”

On the way reading and ideas become inseparable from remembered places and people · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Art
• Memory

“She, too, I never saw before or since—it was indeed a case of ships that pass in the night—but I have loved her always, and thought of her as a life-long friend.”

Recognising how a brief encounter can acquire the permanence of friendship · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Friendship
• Love
• Memory

“One truth that I have learned from my manifold domestic vicissitudes is that you can make a nice home out of anything, if you choose to try.”

Finding the meaning of home in effort and disposition rather than possessions · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Hope
• Memory
• Truth

“All such losses have been amply compensated for, no doubt—I am not of those who, having outlived them, insist that the old times were better than the new—but they are losses, notwithstanding.”

Holding nostalgia and acceptance together without idealising the past · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Memory
• Time
• Truth

“There is no trace of an English home to go back to now.”

A stark expression of exile and the irreversible loss of home · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Memory
• Time

“For more than thirty years we have not met, and there have been long gaps in our correspondence; but friendship has survived all, unchanged.”

Celebrating friendship that endures despite distance and long silences · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

• Friendship
• Memory
• Time