The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

Staunch & faithful little lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love one ever gives them — & it mitigates the pang of losing them to know how very happy a little affection has made them .

whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.