If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

I can't turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.

The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.

It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.