“How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! ”

“Blessed with so many resources within myself the world was not necessary to me. I could do very well without it.”

“....how good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.”

“Indeed how can one care for those one has never seen?”

“I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes... in a total misapprehension of character at some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why, or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.”

“She has many rare and charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them.”

“Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.”