"I shall be well enough when I get to Kentucky or Alabama. The tonic I need is the tonic of oppositio..." — Dorothea Dix

Of my English friends, I should find language too poor to speak the just praise and the excellence which shines in their characters and lives.

All my habits through life have been singularly removed from any condition of reliance on others, and the feeling - right or wrong - that aloneness is my proper position has prevailed since my early childhood, no doubt nourished and strengthened by many and quick-following bereavements.

I am contracting continually a debt of gratitude which time will never see canceled. There is a treasury from which it will be repaid, but I do not dispense its stores.

There is, in our nature, a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which, unless hourly combated, will overcome and destroy the best faculties of our minds and paralyze our most useful powers.