Our desires have a way of getting bigger with our incomes.

You should not want to know the things in people's minds. If you were meant to hear them, they would be said.

People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.

Well, of course, people are only human... But it really does not seem much for them to be.

Well, Buttermere, this is a day that is good to live and breathe in, that makes a man feel in his prime. Standing here in front of my house, I feel as young as when I moved into it thirty years ago, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-nine. What aged man would you take me to be, as I step as it were casually into your view?

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Duty is seldom liked either by the doer or the object ... And why should it be? It is not often of advantage to either.