How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.