All perfection is melancholy.

For everybody knows that it requires very little to satisfy the gentlemen, if a woman will only give her mind to it.

Against the long years when family bonds make up all that is happiest in life, there must always be reckoned those moments of agitation and revolution, during which the bosom of a family is the most unrestful and disturbing place in existence.

A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home.

Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought.

... up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I have attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.

Laughing is not the first expression of joy. ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears.