No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.

Don't judge a book by its cover

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.