“The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”

“People hate as they love, unreasonably.”

“Have you ever had a difference with a dear friend? How his letters, written in the period of love and confidence, sicken and rebuke you! What a dreary mourning it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of dead affection! What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of love! What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities! Most of us have got or written drawers full of them. They are closet-skeletons which we keep and shun”

“At certain periods of life, we live years of emotion in a few weeks, and look back on those times as on great gaps between the old life and the new.”

“In a word, in adversity she was the best of comforters, in good fortune the most troublesome of friends...”

“To know nothing, or little, is in the nature of some husbands. To hide, in the nature of how many women? Oh, ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners' bills? How many of you have gowns and bracelets which you daren't show, or which you wear trembling?--trembling, and coaxing with smiles the husband by your side, who does not know the new velvet gown from the old one, or the new bracelet from last year's, or has any notion that the ragged-looking yellow lace scarf cost forty guineas and that Madame Bobinot is writing dunning letters every week for the money!”