“After all, it is easier to adapt yourself to foreign ways than to adapt them to you.”

A concise lesson in humility and flexibility while encountering another culture · From Gretna Green to Land's End

• Change
• Culture
• Humility

“There is no security on this whirring planet where pain is pain, and loss is loss, but where, for our deepest of consolation, though it involves our keenest of grief, love is always love.”

Finding enduring consolation in love despite the certainty of suffering and loss · Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road

• Consolation
• Grief
• Love

“Through Sigurd our circle of fellowship was widened for all time.”

Reflecting on how companionship can enlarge one's sense of fellowship · Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road

• Animals
• Community
• Friendship

“And still I would almost rather meet a new dog than a new poet.”

A playful admission of how deeply she valued the companionship of animals · Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road

• Animals
• Friendship
• Humour

“I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.”

Recalling the experience that inspired her vision of America's landscape · Recollection of Pikes Peak, 1893

• Joy
• Nature
• Wonder

“Though born and bred in the Republican camp, I cannot bear their betrayal of Mr. Wilson and their rejection of the League of Nations, our one hope of peace on earth.”

Putting the hope of international peace above longstanding party loyalty · Political statement, 1924

• Peace
• Politics
• Principle

“I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don't think I mind not being woven in.”

A witty defence of independence from conventional expectations · Conversation, 1910

• Convention
• Independence
• Wit

“Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven.”

An unusually candid statement of affection and longing · Letter to Katharine Coman, 1891

• Faith
• Longing
• Love

“It was never very possible to leave Wellesley, because so many love-anchors held me there.”

Describing the human attachments that made a place feel inseparable from home · Letter to Katharine Coman, 1891

• Community
• Home
• Love

“You are always in my heart and in my longings.”

A direct expression of enduring attachment across separation · Letter to Katharine Coman, 1893

• Longing
• Love

“The charm of it all is not easily to be defined. Perhaps if one could name it, the spell were broken.”

Suggesting that some artistic effects depend precisely upon resisting complete explanation · Essay, Wishmakers' Town, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Art
• Beauty
• Wonder

“They bewitch the memory, having once caught it, and insist on saying themselves over and over.”

Capturing the way memorable poetry continues to sound inwardly long after reading · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Language
• Memory
• Poetry

“A poet's lyrics may be, as most of Browning's are, just so many dramatis personae.”

Treating lyric poems as potentially dramatic voices rather than straightforward autobiography · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Identity
• Literature
• Poetry

“The lyrist may speak in character, like the dramatist.”

Reminding readers that a lyric voice need not be identical with the poet's private self · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Identity
• Poetry
• Writing

“The color of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of its affinities.”

Describing influence as an organic blending of a writer's mind with congenial ideas and voices · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Imagination
• Mind
• Writing

“The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions, been the most indebted to their predecessors or to their contemporaries.”

Rejecting the idea that artistic greatness requires complete independence from earlier writers · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Literature
• Poetry
• Tradition

“A pessimistic poet, like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sarcasms.”

A memorable metaphor for Aldrich's conviction that poetry and persistent pessimism sit uneasily together · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Despair
• Humour
• Poetry

“Nearly all true poets have been wholesome and joyous singers.”

Expressing Aldrich's preference for poetry rooted in vitality rather than cultivated despair · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Joy
• Life
• Poetry

“There is no such thing as “form” alone; it is only the close-grained material that takes the highest finish.”

Arguing that polished form depends upon substance worthy of craftsmanship · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Art
• Poetry
• Skill

“Oblivion likes especially to get hold of occasional poems.”

A witty observation on how quickly poetry written for particular occasions can be forgotten · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Humour
• Memory
• Poetry

“In most cases the timely ode is somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's editorial of literature.”

Warning that poetry tied too closely to passing events may lose its vitality when those events recede · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Literature
• Poetry
• Time

“A fine thing incomparably said instantly becomes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of dateless excellence.”

Describing how exceptional writing can escape its historical moment and feel permanently contemporary · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Art
• Literature
• Time

“So many poets have announced their arrival, and not arrived!”

A concise joke about poetic ambition and the uncertainty of literary reputation · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Fame
• Humour
• Poetry

“It has always been an incredulous world in this matter.”

Observing the difficulty poets face in persuading contemporaries that their work will endure · Essay, Robert Herrick, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Criticism
• Fame
• Poetry