PHYLLIS BOTTOME

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties or you alter yourself meeting them.

Truth, though it has many disadvantages, is at least changeless. You can always find it where you left it.

It is very a dangerous thing to have an idea that you will not practice.

Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from within.

There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final.

To be in the right is often an expensive business.

artists are exposed to great temptations: their eyes see paradise before their souls have reached it, and that is a great danger.

Love comes into your being like a tidal wave ... sometimes it withdraws like a wave, till there isn't such a thing as a pool left, and every bit of your heart is as dry as seaweed beyond the wave's reach.

Every hen thinks she has laid the best egg! Can we not all believe as we choose? But the choice of others - what is that to us? Let them alone.

... one pets what one degrades; and one has to support what one has enfeebled

A red-hot belief in eternal glory is probably the best antidote to human panic that there is.

When a reserved person once begins to talk, nothing can stop him; and he does not want to have to listen, until he has quite finished his unfamiliar exertion.

No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance.

Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.

Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.

The two best subjects for conversation are talking shop and making love.

if you listen long enough - or is it deep enough? - the silence of a lover can speak plainer than any words! Only you must know how to listen. Pain must have taught you how.

Death deceives relations often, and doctors sometimes, but the patient - never.

If money had been the way to save the world, Christ himself would have been rich.

Curses are children of hate; they belong to the wrong family! Prayers are better than curses!

Truth is no man's slave - but lies - what magnificent servants they make.

Our responsibility to ourselves comes first -- because in a sense what one is oneself is the responsibility that one has for others!

There is no thermometer for wants!

... the ears of the hunted grow even keener than a hunter's.

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!