but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.

I did not know till now how irresolute a character was mine.

No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.

You are afraid to die?' Yes, everyone is.' But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.

Perhaps, she says (Madame de la Rougierre), Other souls than human are sometimes born into the world & clothed in human flesh.