Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret

"You seem to have quite a taste for discussing these horrible subjects," she said, rather scornfully; "you ought to have been a detective police officer."I sometimes think I should have been a good one."Why"Because I am patient."

"Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world."

". . . when the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seem saturated with his one great sorrow."

"The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex."

"Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea."

". . . and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose, because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken them."

"Do you think I will suffer myself to be baffled?"