There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.

Women are so enigmatical - some in everything - all in matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is repulsive?

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.

There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

I can not help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.

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