“You can greet even the dullest acquaintance with pleasure, if you have forgotten their dreary story.”

“She simply cannot let go of love- and who can blame that? Is it not the hardest thing in the world to relinquish, once you have it?”

“I am no faint-heart when it comes to the unpleasant truth. Indeed I have always taken a bracing sort of pleasure in facing it.”

“People argue themselves out of their pleasures”

“I love you more than I can express, or can ever hope to express”

“Anne’s is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.”

“That's the way girls are isn't it? They swear eternal friendship, and then as soon as a man's in the case it's all forgotten.”