There can be — there ought to be — no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about … - Dinah Craik

All that we know of Thee, or knowing not Love only, waiting till the perfect time When we shall know even as we are known;— O Thou Child Jesus, Thou dost seem to say By the soft silence of these heavenly eyes (That rose out of the depths of nothingness Upon this limner's reverent soul and hand) We too should be about our father's business — O Christ, hear us!

To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.

The world! It is a word capable of as diverse interpretations or misinterpretations as the thing itself — a thing by various people supposed to belong to heaven, man, or the devil, or alternatively to all three.