“But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!”

“These struggles with the natural character, the strong native bent of the heart, may seem futile and fruitless, but in the end they do good. They tend, however slightly, to give the actions, the conduct, that turn wich Reason approves, and whic Feeling, perharps, too ofter opposes: they certainly make a difference in the general tenor of a life, and certainly make a difference in the general tenor of a life, and enable it to be better regulated, mofe equable, quieter on the surface; and it is on the surface only the common gaze will fall.”

“Since happiness is irrevocably denied me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life: and I will get it, cost what it may.”

“I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures as well as its thorns and toils.”

“I was left there alone - winner of the field. It was the hardest battle I had fought, and the first victory I had gained.”

“A large class of readers … will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletive with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares—what horror it conceals.”

“Good fortune opens the hand as well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely received, but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the sensations.”