Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty.

There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.

The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

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.