“Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?”

“That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!”

“Always wanting another man than your own.”

“I have been thinking ... that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies…”

“What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings, Love and its ecstasy, Will always have been great things, great things to me!”

“To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.”

“I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!”