All letters, methinks, should be as free and easy as one’s discourse, not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm. - Dorothy Osborne

'[T]is a sad thing when all one's happiness is only that the world does not know you are miserable.

I am not apt to suspect without just cause, but in earnest if I once find anybody faulty towards me, they lose me for ever; I have forsworn being twice deceived by the same person.

The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock, I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows and sit in the shade singing of ballads. [...] I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world, but the knowledge that they are so.