I have striven never to betray myself.
No young woman of good breeding should show exclusive partiality to one partner all night.
There are some people who like nothing better than a good, regular quarrel.
I make a rule never to remember anything before last week. It makes life more interesting.
I do not say that I could never be persuaded to sacrifice my reputation to passion- only that it would take a great deal.
Keats was getting a reputation just when he was too ill to appreciate it or build on it: his country was taking notice of him just when he would have to leave it.
Curious creatures we mortals are-how we do not know what we want, or how to get it if we do.
Life is shockingly short to trouble about certain things.
Dullness it is that perverts and corrups the spirit but it is always possible to look past the dullness, and see the bright, shining heart of things.
Perhaps grown women are beings of a good deal more complexity than cats.
The glitter of the great world, you know, is only so much froth and spume: you may look in vain for happiness there.
She sincerely wishes success, for her new life, and intends that no failure of effort, temper, or spirits on her part will jeopardise it.
I must try to be charitable, Caroline thought: probably she doesn’t mean to sound as if she is continually translating from Latin.
No amount of parental protectiveness could overcome the fact that she was very ready to be dazzled.
It is so important to think for yourself.
A happy marriage- a love match- is something overwhelming, and overpowering.
Anne’s is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity – but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.
Everyone has something of the spiti that animates the artist.
Imagination shrinks from the consequences.
Without money and without connections- I have failed you!