Lucía’s Reviews > The Woman in White > Status Update

Chemists—I assert it emphatically—might sway, if they pleased, the destinies of humanity. (...) Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body (...) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates—the Chemist.

One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege!

The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

It holds with animals, it holds with children, and it holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one quality the animals, the children, and the women all fail in. If they can once shake this superior quality in their master, they get the better of HIM. If they can never succeed in disturbing it, he gets the better of THEM.

Human ingenuity, my friend, has hitherto only discovered two ways in which a man can manage a woman. One way is to knock her down—a method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and educated classes above them. The other way (much longer, much more difficult, but in the end not less certain) is never to accept a provocation at a woman's hands.

Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame,a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.

There are many kinds of curiosity, I know—but there is no misinterpreting the curiosity of blank surprise.

Where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing back? Where is the woman who has ever really torn from their heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed—but what does our own experience say in answer to books?

Every word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and truth to a man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a pure and true woman.