“A hermit-crab am I by nature, and shall be, to the end of my days. And yet the human kind is a very good kind, and kindly human too.”

Holding solitude and affection for humanity together without contradiction · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Friendship
• Solitude

“That's the charming thing about great writing, it's never the same twice over.”

On how great literature changes as the reader changes · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Time

“It seems to me one of the few books that are like an experience; you are not quite the same after you have read it as you were before.”

Defining a great book by its power to alter the reader · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Memory

“The fine arts are all fine ladies, and they cannot replace each other or lay down the law for each other, but they may exchange courtesies now and again?”

Defending the distinctness of the arts while allowing fruitful exchange between them · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Beauty

“There are things that Art is bound to try, and never to accomplish, and the very effort after them, given that it is the highest effort of the imagination, interests more than success.”

Valuing ambitious artistic striving even when complete success is impossible · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Beauty

“Stevenson was a poet who couldn't write poetry, but could and did live it.”

Separating poetic temperament from the formal writing of verse · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Poetry

“What is most carefully made often sounds as if it had been felt straight off, whereas what has been felt carelessly sounds as if it were made.”

Observing that accomplished craft can create an impression of spontaneity · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Poetry

“Poetry is, by its very derivation, making, not feeling.”

Insisting that poetry depends on craft rather than emotion alone · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Poetry

“There are some words that are like a flight of steps that end in mid-air, and there is nothing but the sky above them.”

Describing language that carries thought to the edge of the unsayable · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Poetry
• Truth

“The law of love, which is freedom; if we could only be ruled by that!”

Linking genuine love with freedom rather than possession or coercion · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Love
• Truth

“Feeling goes higher and deeper, is at the same time more instinctive and animal, and more divine.”

Giving feeling a range that reaches from instinct to the spiritual · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Faith
• Truth

“Light has such different ways with it; in some places it lies, in some it falls, in some it strikes.”

A painterly observation on the character of light in different landscapes · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Beauty
• Nature

“The quiet, solemn feeling of gladness sweeps over one like a great wave. It buries all the restlessness, all the anxiousness, all the vanity.”

Describing the cleansing calm brought by landscape and sunset · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Joy
• Nature

“There's no pathos of age except where it touches humanity.”

Locating the poignancy of age in human experience rather than mere antiquity · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Mortality
• Time

“Perhaps nothing thrills us that is not or has not been in some way human.”

Seeing human association as the source of emotional resonance · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Memory
• Truth

“Funny, what waste of time all doing seems by the side of being! And yet I know that the least little thing done is better than all this fine dreaming.”

Balancing contemplative delight against the value of action · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Time
• Truth

“The sky is greater reading than the Bible, the sea than Shakespeare.”

Placing direct experience of nature beside the greatest books she knew · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Faith
• Nature

“Nothing has such deadly power to corrupt as unalloyed virtue.”

A paradoxical warning against virtue untouched by humility or complexity · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Truth

“Qualifications absolutely necessary for a good historian: imagination; prejudice; the power of writing your own biography at the same time.”

A mischievous view of history as inseparable from personality and interpretation · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897

• Memory
• Truth

“To catch the sun and keep him in a book—what a hopeless business! Yet never twice the same clouds gather round him touched with the same colours; it is human to grasp at them.”

On the human urge to preserve beauty that cannot be repeated · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897

• Beauty
• Nature
• Time

“Joy is a host of happinesses, each quite unlike all the rest.”

Recognising joy as a succession of distinct and unrepeatable moments · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1896

• Joy
• Time

“It is the very High Art of Love. There is an art of it, I'm certain.”

Presenting loving well as a skill that can shape another person · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1894

• Art
• Love

“One gets a hunger for certain faces and to feel a certain kind of love round one.”

Capturing the bodily immediacy of longing for familiar affection · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1894

• Friendship
• Love

“The points at which we touch are almost infinitesimal compared with the vast tracts of difference.”

Recognising how little of one another even close companions can fully share · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1892

• Love
• Solitude