The people are to be taken in very small doses. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

And every man, in love or pride, Of his fate is ever wide.

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.