She was dull, unattractive, couldn't tell the time, count money or tie her own shoe laces... But I loved her

She'd wanted to run an inn. To welcome people, to mother them. They had no children of their own, and she had a powerful need to nurture.

She had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody's private fantasies.

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

To create - a role, a poem, picture, music, a rapture in stone: great. But not for her.
What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other.
She would polish and hone that.

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

Unless a Woman has an Amorous Heart,
She is a Dull Companion.

She was desperate and she was choosey
at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what
she imagined herself to be.

She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.

She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time — because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.

She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart.

She looked just like a painting dying to speak.

She had been born to cradle other people's children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people's roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery.

She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.