“Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.”

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

Of Dickens’ style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules…

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.

Of all hatreds that the world produces, a wife’s hatred for her husband, when she does hate him, is the strongest.

Let a man be of what side he may in politics, unless he be much more of a partisan than a patriot, he will think it well that there should be some equity of division in the bestowal of crumbs of comfort.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?…Was ever anything so civil?

The concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women’s voices?

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

If a cook can’t make soup between two and seven, she can’t make it in a week.

Audacity in wooing is a great virtue, but a man must measure even his virtues.

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.

I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.

My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.

For there is no folly so great as keeping one’s sorrows hidden.

No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

Religion is like a personal computer. You let people in if you want to… We’re all gods.

All I can say is that you make me… you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

Frank nodded grimly. “Well…any goddess who throws a Ding Dong at a giant can’t be all bad. Let’s go.

What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,–just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all.

Self praise is no praise at all.

I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself, yet cannot overcome – and so I live. Would I had never lived!