“Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel?”

“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

“Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.”

“I hate a stupid man who can't talk to me, and I hate a clever man who talks me down. I don’t like a man who is too lazy to make any effort to shine; but I particularly dislike the man who is always striving for effect. I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth and all that kind of thing. . . A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can't show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.”

“There was but one thing for him;- to persevere till he got her, or till he had finally lost her. And should the latter be his fate, as he began to fear that it would be, then, he would live, but live only, like a crippled man.”

“The end of a novel, like the end of children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plum”

“To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.”