My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.

I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.

...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.

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.