I required kindness and sympathy, but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it.

The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.

I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.

Evil thenceforth became my good.

Allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half painful self-deceit, to call them).

. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.

Happiness is in its highest degree the sister of goodness.