Their support was not needed, therefore they were not courted. - Anthony Trollope

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned; and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.

The end of a novel, like the end of children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plum