For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.

A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one.

There is nothing more startling in human relations that the strong emotion of weak people.

Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.

Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.