I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other.

It is a hard, embittering thing to have one's kind feelings and good intentions cast back in one's teeth.

No one can be happy in eternal solitude.

My cup of sweets is not unmingled: it is dashed with a bitterness that I cannot hide from myself, disguise it as I will.

Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

The bud, though plucked, would not be withered, only transplanted to a fitter soil to ripen and blow beneath a brighter sun; and though I might not cherish and watch my child's unfolding intellect, he would be snatched away from all the suffering and sins of earth; and my understanding tells me this would be no great evil; but my heart shrinks from the contemplation of such a possibility, and whispers I could not bear to see him die.