“If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: Byron is dead!”

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

The triumphal-procession-air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset – that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun.

When one has been threatened with a great injustice, one accepts a smaller as a favour.

The surest way to get a thing in this life is to be prepared for doing without it, to the exclusion even of hope.

It is sad and wrong to be so dependent for the life of my life on any human being as I am on you; but I cannot by any force of logic cure myself at this date, when it has become second nature.

Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

People who are so dreadfully “devoted” to their wives are so apt, from mere habit, to get devoted to other people’s wives as well.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

The less one does, as I long ago observed, the less one can find time to do.

A fashionable wife! Oh! Never will I be anything so heartless! I have pictured for myself a far higher destiny than this. – Will it ever be more than a picture?

In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.

On earth the living have much to bear; the difference is chiefly in the manner of bearing, and my manner of bearing is far from being the best.

Homeopathy – an invention of the Father of Lies! I have tried it and found it wanting. I would swallow their whole doles medicine chest for sixpence, and be sure of finding myself neither better nor worse for it.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother’s loss makes itself felt.

Cracked things often hold out as long as whole things; one takes so much better care of them!

I am so tired of waking to the blank canvas of morning and realizing it won’t be painted with you.

I love to go down to the schoolyard and watch all the little children jump up and down and run around yelling and screaming. They don’t know I’m only using blanks.

I like Stallone, because he writes. He sits down with a blank page and comes up with another Rambo movie. That isn’t very easy for anybody. He’s made it successful on top of that.

I become a bit of a blank page in public. And that’s precisely why I like acting.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

Even though I know who I am, musically I’m a blank canvas. I know what colors I want to use, but I don’t know what picture I want to paint yet.

I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment.’

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.