“I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me.”

“...the surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve."Bethia as an old woman about to die p 257”

“At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall into such sins as I committed as a girl, when hours that were my own to spend spread before me like a gift.”

“If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.”

“The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.”

“Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother, rather than that selfish, imperious, weak-willed soul to whom fate had shackled me.”

“I did note this, and set it down as yet one more of life’s injustices: that the man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor. My creditors would come to me most graciously, diffident, if not downright apologetic, for asking what was theirs. It was as if I would be doing them a great, unlooked for kindness if only I would pay them a trifling sum on my outstanding debts. I would give them tea, and polite conversation, and, even when my answer to their just entreaty had to be a regretful, “Nothing, sir, ” my mortification was always entirely self-inflicted, for their civility never failed”