Francesca Carrara

"There are words to paint the misery of love, but none to paint its happiness ; that childish, glad, and confiding time, to which youth gave its buoyancy and hope its colours. Its language repeated, ever seems exaggerated or foolish ; albeit there are none who have not thought such sounds "honey-sweet" in their time. The truth is, we never make for others the allowance we make for ourselves ; and we should deny even our own words, could we hear them spoken by another."

"It is wonderful how some words ever were invented, for they express what does not exist—confidence is among the number; confidence is what no human being ever really had in another."

"Memory has many conveniences, and, among others, that of foreseeing things as they have afterwards happened."

"Never tell me of the sterner beauties of winter. Winter may have a mighty beauty of its own, where the mountain rises, white with the snow of a thousand years, hemmed in by black pine forests, eternal in their gloom ; where the overhanging avalanche makes terrible even the slightest sound of the human voice ; and where waters that never flowed spread the glittering valleys with the frost-work of the measureless past. But the characteristic of English scenery is loveliness. We look for the verdant green of her fields, for the colours of her wild and garden flowers, for daisies universal as hope, and for the cheerful hedges, so various in leaf and bud. Winter comes to us with gray mists and drizzling rains : now and then, for a day, the frost creates its own fragile and fairy world of gossamer ; but not often. We see the desolate trees, bleak and bare ; the dreary meadows, the withered gardens, and close door and window, to exclude the fog and the east wind."

"Who knows how many links we may have to ascend in the vast cycle of worlds around, ere we arrive at the one which is knowledge — where we may look before, and after, and judge of the whole ? How many stages of probation may we yet have to pass !"

"There is something peculiarly mournful in the sound of the autumn wind. It has none of the fierce mirth which belongs to that of March, calling aloud, as with the voice of a trumpet, on all earth to rejoice ; neither has it the mild rainy melody of summer, when the lily has given its softness and the rose its sweetness to the gentle tones. Still less has it the dreary moan, the cry as of one in pain, which is borne on a November blast ; but it has a music of its own — sad, low, and plaintive, like the last echoes of a forsaken lute — a voice of weeping, but tender and subdued, like the pleasant tears shed over some woful romance of the olden time, telling some mournful chance of the young knight falling in his first battle, or of a maiden pale and perishing with ill-requited love. Onward passes that complaining wind through the quiet glades, like the angel of death mourning over the beauty it is commissioned to destroy. At every sweep down falls a shower of sapless leaves — ghosts of the spring — with a dry, sorrowful rustle ; and every day the eye misses some bright colour of yesterday, or marks some bough left entirely bare and sear; and ever and anon, on some topmost branch, as the foliage is quite swept off, a deserted nest is visible — love, spring, and music, passed away together."

"Time passed as time ever does when passed monotonously, that is, with a degree of rapidity which only astonishes us when it is recalled to mind by some chance circumstance. Time should he reckoned by events, not hours ; the heart is its truest time-piece, at least as concerns ourselves."

"A woman only can understand a woman; and it is pleasant to be understood sometimes."

"The truth is, we like to talk over our disasters, because they are ours ; and others like to listen, because they are not theirs."

"THE history of a minute — why, it would give a birds-eye view of every possible variety in human existence. Wonderful the many events that are happening together — life and death — joy and sorrow— the great and the mean — the common and the rare — good and evil — are all in the record of that brief segment of time."

"... love cares not for distinctions ; but friendship cannot exist without equality."

"There are some moments, the hues of which are like those on the wing of a butterfly — a touch brushes them away."