“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”

I may do some good before I am dead–be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces… made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

All romances end at marriage.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession.

Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.

I’m a million miles away, and at the same time I’m right here in your picture frame.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

The shortest distance to leadership is service.

You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other.

A great stench will come from Lausanne, but they will not know its origin; they will put out all people from distant places, fire seen in the sky, a foreign nation defeated.

There’s not much I know about forgetting. By which I mean I can hear her name from a distance; and it still breathes cold in my chest.