If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.
And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.
The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.
Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.
I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.
The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
The fool’s crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man’s crime is the crime that is not found out.
I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit’s haunting a house ; but I have had my own personal experience of a house’s haunting a spirit.
I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard and shows the bare bones beneath.
The best men are not consistent in good – why should the worst men be consistent in evil.
We had our breakfasts – whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.
It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
I never paid you a compliment, Rachel, in my life. Successful love may sometimes use the language of flattery, I admit. But hopeless love, dearest, always speaks the truth.
Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed – but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?
Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
I am an average good Christian, when you don’t push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you – which is a great comfort – are, in this respect, much the same as I am.