The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.

I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.

As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor.

[I]n his presence I thoroughly lived.

No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by.

There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.

You — you strange — you almost unearthly thing! — I love as my own flesh. You — poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are — I entreat to accept me as a husband.