“Just a month from this day, on the twentieth of September, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o' clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.”

“I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content.”

“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of abeginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to startwith a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that timeis at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always beenunderstood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appearsthat her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit intobillions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets offin medias res. No retrospect will take us to the truebeginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it isbut a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our storysets out.”

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”

“Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.”

“I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.”

“Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.”