Miss Delightful Quotes

“Remorse was the thief of contentment”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Was that the sum of adulthood’s accomplishments? The ability to appear composed and appropriate at all times?”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“That matters so much, to know that you can make something beautiful and useful, that you can add to the world’s joys with the labor of your hands.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“I have made what peace I can with a life many would envy.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Never did a family muddle along with as many good intentions and misguided efforts as the Delanceys.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“You followed your heart,” she said when the tears had run their course. “That takes courage, and without courage, all the virtue in the world is only so many stitched samplers.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Ruin is vastly preferable to a slow death from excesses of pious hypocrisy.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“We have poverty in Wales, dire, desperate poverty, but we don’t regard it as anything other than bad fortune, a situation to be endured and pitied. Here… bad luck is God’s way of saying everybody else can piss on you while pretending to pray for you.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Bad enough we consign streetwalkers to starvation, the elements, and disease. They should not have to put up with outright brutality.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Many a client refuses to pay, others are abusive. Disease is a constant risk, as is childbed. It’s a desperate life for the streetwalker, and as the children come along, one that sinks her only more quickly into poverty.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Most of them aren’t fallen in any moral sense. They have regular jobs, they might be married, they look after their grannies and say their prayers every night. They simply aren’t paid enough coin to keep body and soul together.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Most of the women providing favors for coin are simply supplementing wages too meager to live on. They have occupations, they have families. Many are married and would rather not work the streets ever again. If we paid the ladies better wages—or allowed married women to keep their wages rather than force them turn every groat over to a husband who squanders his coin—we’d have a lot less vice. Instead, we harangue the women about morality, while male greed and lustfulness are the real problems.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“what sort of God… What sort of Christian turns a blind eye to a new mother in desperate straits?”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“To encourage sloth or dependency in those not born to wealth would be unkind—and giving them clean air and safe water would be only the first step on that misguided—and expensive—road to coddling them.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“But for the increasing masses of London poor, nothing was spent.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Britain had all the money in the world for expanding its empire, she was right about that.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“This city needs sewers, Mr. MacKay, but what do the newspapers have to say about it? Who will pay for these sewers? That is their sole contribution to the discussion.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Rage at a society that insisted women be raised in ignorance and judged without mercy when their lack of wisdom resulted in a mis-step.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“They complimented me on my zeal. I hate that word when it’s used to mean foolishness.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful

“Hope must be the greatest torment the damned suffer. You put it aside, or lose your wits.”
― Grace Burrowes, Miss Delightful