"Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dain..." — Emily Dickinson

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother - but... when she became our child, the affection came.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him! The charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded, I fear, by the heaven in the hand, occasionally.