“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

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.