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Age
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To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Birds
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What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Miss Mehitabel
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Books
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Books that have become classics -- books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal -- always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Boredom
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The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Civilization
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Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Failure
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They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Oceans
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The ocean moans over dead men's bones.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Sincerity
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Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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Sleep
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When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream as in a fairy bark
Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
To purple daybreak--little thought we pay
To that sweet bitter world we know by day.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sonnet - Sleep
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Sunset
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Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows
In yonder West: the fair, frail palaces,
The fading Alps and archipelagoes,
And great cloud-continents of sunset-seas.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sonnet, Miracles
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Books by and about Thomas Bailey Aldrich