MARIE CORELLI

I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.

Such lovely warmth of thought and delicacy of colour are beyond all praise, and equally beyond all thanks!

I must not say what I truly think, or you will tell me I flatter you-but I can only speak what I feel-and very often I cannot even do that when the feeling is very deep.

You should always be well and bright, for so you do your best work; and you have so much beautiful work to do. The world needs it, and you must give it!

I entirely agree with you about the obscurity of Mrs Browning's line about the stars. It is far-fetched. She wanted to express something which she found beyond expression.

Fancy your having no sunshine in London yesterday! Here it was glorious, like full summer, and I sat up with the window wide open, listening to the discourse of two amorous thrushes.

The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence.

nobody ever intends to be old.

There is nothing so depressing as a constant contemplation of one's self, and the greatest moral cowardice in the world's opinion comes from consulting one's own personal convenience.

There is no Death,/What seems so is transition.

in my opinion, the Divine is revealed to all men once at least in their lives.

work is happiness. No one can take my work from me and therefore no one can take my happiness from me.

When one loves God better than the Church is one called a heretic?

the beginning of my history is - love. It is the beginning of every man and every woman's history, if they are only frank enough to admit it.

How foolish it would be if women did not obey men. The world would be all confusion!

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

I attribute my good fortune to the simple fact that I have always tried to write straight from my own heart to the hearts of others.

Art is sexless; - good work is eternal, no matter whether it is man or woman who has accomplished it. ... Ah, but the world will never own woman's work to be great even if it be so, because men give the verdict, and man's praise is for himself and his own achievements always.

Years should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or consider them? In the world of wild Nature, time is measured by seasons only-the bird does not know how old it is-the rose-tree does not count its birthdays!

Nothing gives small minds a better handle for hatred than superiority.

Imagination is the supreme endowment of the poet and romanticist. It is a kind of second sight, which conveys the owner of it to places he has never seen, and surrounds him with strange circumstances of which he is merely the spiritual eyewitness.

It is not so difficult to win love as to keep it!

the world is not always kind to a clever woman even when she is visibly known to be earning her own living. There are always spiteful tongues wagging in the secret corners and byways, ready to assert that her work is not her own and and that some man is in the background, helping to keep her!

Greatness is always envied - it is only mediocrity that can boast of a host of friends.

No one is contented in this world, I believe. There is always something left to desire, and the last thing longed for always seems the most necessary to happiness.