... learning to love any one is like an increase of property, -- it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes!