“But I am bound to add that I do not regard successful fiction as a thing to be achieved in “leisure moments.”

Rejecting the idea that serious fiction can be mastered casually · Letter to an anonymous correspondent, 27 December 1866

• Art
• Truth

“Each of these dream-children should hold in its powerful hand one of the little children now lying in the Child’s Hospital, or now shut out of it to perish.”

Turning imaginative sympathy towards the urgent needs of sick children · Speech, Hospital for Sick Children, London, 9 February 1858

• Childhood
• Hope

“You have in America great writers—great writers—who will live in all time, and are as familiar to our lips as household words.”

Recognising literature's ability to cross national boundaries and generations · Speech, Boston, February 1842

• Art
• Fame
• Time