The Moonstone

by Wilkie Collins

when you are old, you acquire one excellent habit. In cases where you don’t see your way clearly, you hold your tongue.

“you will see that the nature of a man’s tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of

a man’s business.

What the Sand gets, the Sand keeps for ever.”

Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it.

It left him unsettled, with a legacy of idle time on his hands, and, in so doing, it let out all the foreign sides of his character, one on the top of another, like rats out of a bag.

“You live a great deal too much in the society of women. And you have contracted two very bad habits in consequence. You have learnt to talk nonsense seriously, and you have got into a way of telling fibs for the pleasure of telling them.

oh dear, what is the hardness of stone? Nothing, compared to the hardness of the unregenerate human heart!

The truth is, that women try marriage as a Refuge, far more numerously than they are willing to admit; and, what is more, they find that marriage has justified their confidence in it.

The first instinct of girls in general, on being told of anything which interests them, is to ask a multitude of questions, and then to run off, and talk it all over with some favourite friend.

This absolute self-dependence is a great virtue in a man.

when they first start us on the journey of life. We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.”