19th-century Diarist Quotes

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania

Mary Boykin Chesnut

Alice James

This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness.

W. N. P. Barbellion

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

To be entirely happy in marriage, the same thing must be important to both.

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania

Peace, comfort, quiet, happiness, I have found away from home. Only your own family, those nearest and dearest, can hurt you.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

Yesterday, at Andillac, a little child went to heaven. If I were a little child I should like to follow it, but when one gets old, if one could help it, one would never die. Then it is that the threads that once attached us to earth become cables.

Eugénie de Guérin

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so.

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.

There is a certain strong sense of inner conviction that strikes, with a pang as that of birth, through the very soul, and which is experienced but once or twice in a lifetime.

E. M. Delafield

It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain.

Francis Kilvert