I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye.

For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity.

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.

Reader, I literally married him.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

Friendship however is a plant which cannot be forced -- true friendship is no gourd spring up in a night and withering in a day.