Life is a predicament which precedes death. - Henry James

"Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn't, and what one "would" have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things."

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders.