Truly nothing is to be expected except for the unexpected.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by the way?

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich.

I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.