Quotes from Lady Audley's Secret

“Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“Why, I can't help smiling at people, and speaking prettily to them. I know I'm no better than the rest of the world; but I can't help it if I'm pleasanter. It's constitutional.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“You seem to have quite a taste for discussing these horrible subjects," she said, rather scornfully; "you ought to have been a detective police officer."

"I sometimes think I should have been a good one."

"Why?"

"Because I am patient.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“Do you think I will suffer myself to be baffled?”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“He was a square, pale-faced man of almost forty, and had the appearance of having outlived every emotion to which humanity is subject.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and treacherous murders; slow, protracted agonies from poisons administered by some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths by cruel blows, inflicted with a stake cut from some spreading oak, whose every shadow promised—peace. In the county of which I write, I have been shown a meadow in which, on a quiet summer Sunday evening, a young farmer murdered the girl who had loved and trusted him; and yet, even now, with the stain of that foul deed upon it, the aspect of the spot is—peace. No species of crime has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not been also done in the face of that rustic calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with—peace.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“[...] that magic power of fascination by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“. . . when the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seem saturated with his one great sorrow.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“Now love is so very subtle an essence, such an indefinable metaphysical marvel, that its due force, though very cruelly felt by the sufferer himself, is never clearly understood by those who look on at his torments and wonder why he takes the common fever so badly.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“. . . and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose, because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken them.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“For you see Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“What had been his love for his first wife but a poor, pitiful, smouldering spark, too dull to be distinguished, too feeble to burn? But *this* was love - this fever, this longing, this restless, uncertain, miserable hesitation [...]”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

“It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation.
If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs. Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant.
To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators — anything they like — but let them be quiet — if they can.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, quote from Lady Audley's Secret

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Popular quotes

“My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?”
― Sheldon Vanauken, quote from A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph

“Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schools, pull up their pants, and refuse all forms of illegal work and moneymaking activity, even if jobs in the legal economy are impossible to find. Girls are told not to have children until they are married to a "good" black man who can help provide for a family with a legal job. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. Right even if that means, in a jobless ghetto, never having children at all.”
― Michelle Alexander, quote from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Lanser said, "There are no peaceful people, when will you learn it? There are no friendly people, can't you understand that?”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Moon Is Down

“We can't surrender to the culture. We've minimized the role of fathers, so we've created a generation of barbarians, children who become men without growing up. They stay in boyhood through their 20s and 30s, sometimes their whole lives. They think of themselves first, indulge in pornography, do what they feel like, leave their wives, and culture, and churches to raise their children.”
― Randy Alcorn, quote from Courageous

“Alexander Hamilton Junior High School
-- SEMESTER REPORT --

STUDENT: Joseph Margolis
TEACHER: Janet Hicks

ENGLISH: A, ARITHMETIC: A, SOCIAL STUDIES: A, SCIENCE: A, NEATNESS: A, PUNCTUALITY: A, PARTICIPATION: A, OBEDIENCE: D

Teacher's Comments:
Joseph remains a challenging student. While I appreciate his creativity, I am sure you will agree that a classroom is an inappropriate forum for a reckless imagination. There is not a shred of evidence to support his claim that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian, and even fewer grounds to explain why he even knows what the word means. Similarly, an analysis of the Constitutional Convention does not generate sufficient cause to initiate a two-hour classroom debate on what types of automobiles the Founding Fathers would have driven were they alive today. When asked on a subsequent examination, "What did Benjamin Franklin use to discover electricity?" eleven children responded "A Packard convertible". I trust you see my problem.
[...]
Janet Hicks

Parent's Comments:
As usual I am very proud of Joey's grades. I too was unaware that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian. I assumed they were all Protestants.
Thank you for writing.
Ida Margolis”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer

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