J. Sheridan Le Fanu

“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”

“Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”

“I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.”

“But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.”

“No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.”

“The precautions of nervous people re infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them.”

“Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.”