“Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.”

“She did her work with the thoroughness of mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.”

“She's not stupid. She just never lets her mind out.”

“I do not want to see that girl again:
I did not like her: and I should not mind
If she were done away with, killed, or ploughed.
She did not seem to serve a useful end :
And certainly she was not beautiful.”

“Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.”

“Who was this girl who thumbed her nose at two kingdoms and did as she pleased?”

“She with her eyes my heart does bind,
She with her voice might captivate my mind.”

“But when Anthony kissed her, she felt as
if she were losing her mind. And when he
kissed her twice, she wasn't even sure if she wanted it back!”

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

“I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind.”