It is a strange experience for a man of pride and feeling to know that his interests are in the control of strangers who don’t like or understand him. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or — and the outward semblance is the same — crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will always be in her heart