Friendships are discovered rather than made.

What's your hurry? Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in, said Miss Ophelia.

I did not write it (Uncle Tom's Cabin). God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

Midnight, -- strange mystic hour, -- when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin.

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

It isn't mere love and good-will that is needed in a sick-room; it needs knowledge and experience.

The burning of rebellious thoughts in the little breast, of internal hatred and opposition, could not long go on without slight whiffs of external smoke, such as mark the course of subterranean fire.

It is one mark of a superior mind to understand and be influenced by the superiority of others.

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. Life and death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread.

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?

Sensitive people never like the fatigue of justifying their instincts.

The longest day must have its close -- the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.

It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.

Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly and in a spirit of love.

It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed -- who cannot speak for themselves.

By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?

It is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.