1
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be
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2
The affectionate heart of my aunt, Catherine Porten, bewailed a sister and a friend; but my poor father was inconsolable, and the transport of grief seemed to threaten his life or his reason.
3
There is only one event in my life which never loses its bitterness; which comes back on me like a retreating wave, going and coming again, which was and is my grief--I never had but one brother who loved and comprehended me.
4
When gone from hence, may nobody think of me again, except when one or two may think perhaps how I loved them
5
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
6
When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight.
7
My heart rebelled against God, who had taken from me mother, father, mistress, and friend.
8
the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart
Attribution contested
The words are Keller's, but two things in the popular version are not. The wording is smoothed -- it usually appears as they must be felt with the heart -- and, more importantly, Keller does not present the thought as her own: she writes that her teacher explained it to her. On her own account the sentence belongs at least as much to Anne Sullivan.
9
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
10
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
11
If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.
12
Only, my dear wife, let us both be patient at this calamity.
13
Otherwise, my dear wife, we shall seem discontented at the birth of our little daughter, if we consider our position before her birth as more perfect.
14
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do.
15
The longer we live, and the more we think, the higher value we learn to put on the friendship and tenderness of parents and of friends.
16
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
17
Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.
18
Only in the chamber of death writhed the world's most piteous thing--a childless mother.
19
No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul.