I wasn't educated. I was very lucky.

But what are wishes, compared with longings?

To one who has led a virtuous life, to sin is the easiest thing in the world. No experience of unpleasant consequences grits that smooth sliding fall, no recollection of disillusionment blurs that pure desire.

The body, after all, older and wiser than soul, being first created, and, like a good horse, if given its way would go home by the best path and at the right pace.

I wish I could be a grandmother. It is wanton extravagance to have had a youth with no one to tell of it to when one grows old.

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.

There are some women in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.