I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .

People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.

Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or...of something else.

The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.