I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas! – T. E. Lawrence
[I]f any one had asked what gifts she desired most, she would have answered with a look more pathetic than any shivering child had given her: “I want the sound of a loving voice; the touch of a friendly hand.” – Louisa May Alcott, “Seamstress,” Work: A Story of Experience, 1873