“You shall be my pet, and my poppet, and my dearest little duck all the days of your life.”

“And, above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

“My dear, the truth must be spoken. I declare I don't think I ever saw a young woman so improvident as you are. When are you to begin to think about getting married if you don't do it now?""I shall never begin to think about it, till I buy my wedding clothes.”

“And now, O kind-hearted reader, I feel myself constrained, in the telling of this little story, to depart altogether from the principles of story telling to which you probably have become accustomed and to put the horse of my romance before the cart. There is a mystery respecting Mr and Mrs Peacocke which, according to all laws recognised in such matters, ought not to be elucidated till, let us say, the last chapter but two, so that your interest should be maintained almost to the end, -- so near the end that there should be left only space for those little arrangements which are necessary for the well-being, or perhaps for the evil-being, of our personages. It is my purpose to disclose the mystery at once, and to ask you to look for your interest, -- should you choose to go on with my chronicle, -- simply in the conduct of my persons, during this disclosure, to others. You are to know it all before the Doctor or the Bishop, -- before Mrs. Wortle or the Hon Mrs Stantiloup, or Lady De Lawle. You are to know it all before the Peacockes become aware that it must necessarily be disclosed to any one. It may be that when I shall have once told the mystery there will no longer be any room for interest in the tale to you. That there are many such readers of novels I know. I doubt whether the greater number be not such. I am far from saying that the kind of interest of which I am speaking – and of which I intend to deprive myself, -- is not the most natural and the most efficacious. What would the ‘Black Dwarf’ be if every one knew from the beginning that he was a rich man and a baronet? – or ‘The Pirate,’ if all the truth about Norna of the Fitful-head had been told in the first chapter? Therefore, put the book down if the revelation of some future secret be necessary for your enjoyment. Our mystery is going to be revealed in the next paragraph, -- in the next half-dozen words. Mr and Mrs Peacocke were not man and wife.”

“Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.”

“Babbling may be a weakness, but to my thinking mystery is a vice.”

“This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.”