Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.