If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed.

I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you

Your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you.

Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on?

You have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face.

Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?