Quotes from AMELIA E. BARR

He's a bad man, sent with sorrow and shame wherever he goes, and I know it just as I know the long dead roll of the waves and the white creeping mist--like a dirty thief--which makes me cry out at sea 'All hands to reef! Quick! All hands to reef!'

The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful.

We hear voices in solitude, we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life; we receive counsels and comforts, we get under no other condition.

There was an iron-gray sky above a black tumbling sea; and the rain, driven by a mad wind, smote the face like a blow from a passionate hand.

It was about this time I began to seriously try to write. I commenced a tragedy which I called "Seneca." I do not remember anything about the work, except that it was laid in ancient Rome, and that Seneca was a philosopher and a senator. I showed the first act to Father, and he gave it back to me with a smile, and the opinion that "it might have been worse."

O Love! what cruelties are done in thy name! We think of thee as coming with a rose, and a song, and a smile.

A child that has not been taught to reverence God, and all that represents God to man—honor, honesty, justice, mercy, truth, love, courage, self-sacrifice, is sent into the world like a boat sent out to sea, without rudder, ballast, compass or captain.

All education has this provisional quality. In school, as well as in dreams, we learn in childhood a great deal that finds no immediate use or expression. For many years we may scarcely remember the lesson, then comes the occasion for it, and the information needed is suddenly restored.

He said the words so sternly that they seemed to make a gloom in the cottage, but Joan's cheerful laugh cleared it away.

There was something so final about the man's manner that Roland was compelled to accept the dismissal, but it deeply offended him, and the unreasonable anger opened the door for evil thoughts; and evil thoughts—having a cursed and powerful vitality—immediately began to take form and to make plans for their active gratification.

For the woman within, if she be of noble strain, is never content with what she has attained; she unceasingly presses forward, in lively hope of some better way, or some more tangible truth.

It takes a man to know men and all the wickedness mixed up in their flesh and blood.

One of the cruelest things about a wrong love is that it delights in tangles and hidden ways; that it teaches and practices deceit from its first inception; that its earliest efforts are toward destroying all older and more sacred attachments.

O love! love! love! Is there any sorrow in life like loving?

I doubt if any child is born without some measure of that vision and faculty divine which apprehends the supernatural.

I loved God with all my child heart. He was truly to me "my Father who art in heaven." Well then, death whom He sent to every one, even to little babies, must be something good and not evil. Also, I thought, if the dead are unhappy, their faces would show it, and I had never seen a dead face without being struck by its strange quiet.

A child is a deep mystery. It has a life of its own, which it reveals to no one unless it meets with sympathy. Snub its first halting confidences concerning the inner life, or laugh at them, or be cross or indifferent, and you close the door against yourself forever.

Alas! it is not the renunciation of our past and future selves that is difficult; it is the steady denial of our present self which makes the disciple.