Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil.

The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!

Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.

...it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.