Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history? - William Makepeace Thackeray

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm-I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seem a woman hide the dulness of a stupid husband or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it; we call this pretty treachery truth. A good housewife is of necessity a humbug.

So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.