"In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for s…"

"What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?"

"I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, The gray and wintry sides of many glens, And did but half remember huma…"

"As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and …"

"I’m a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen."

"I asked if I got sick and died, would you With my black funeral go walking too, If you’d stand close to hear them tal…"

"Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung and liver, In her g…"

"These are rotten, so you’re the Queen Of all are living, or have been."

"When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the fl…"

"May I meet him with one tooth and it aching, and one eye to be seeing seven and seventy divils in the twists of the r…"