“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”
“Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.”
“No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.”
“Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.”
“The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”
“Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.”
“Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.”
“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.”
“Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.”
“I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.”
“The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.”
“I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.”
“This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”
“She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.”
“I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!”
“There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their wine;they can't play at wist;and they can't pay a lady a compliment.”
“The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.”
“Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?”
“...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. ”
“When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.”
“Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace - they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship - they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”
“Dont speak of tomorrow.Let the music speak to us tonight,in a happier language than ours.”
“I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.”
“Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.”
“Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view.”
“It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.”
“But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?”
“No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace – they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship – they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”
“The width of neck and shoulder suggested a rugby player, the broken nose confirmed it. Which shows just how wrong you can be as he never played the game in his life.”
“Lucy’s Rules to Live By:
1. Make the conscious decision to look at others with an open mind and an open heart.
2. Everybody needs someone in their life they can rely on. Try to be that person.
3. Take a chance.
4. Love whole-heartedly.
5. Make it your goal to make someone smile daily.
6. Always expect more of yourself today than you did yesterday.
7. No matter how many times you’re let down, continue believing in the goodness of others.”
“She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time thinking. He would press both fists to his brow and begin to think. What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were imponderable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the lesser panda, which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy bear and lives on the trees in inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative: in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed.”
“Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.”
“Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.”
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