What I absorbed from autobiographies was not how to be great so much as the littleness of the great.
Miles FranklinI'm sure it's not any wish of mine that I'm born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I'd be born the lowest and coarsest-minded person imaginable, so that I could find plenty of companionship, or I'd be born an idiot, which would be better still.
Miles FranklinIt is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier years.
Miles Franklin