Quotes from Anthony Trollope

As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.

He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little -- or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

They are best dressed, whose dress no one observes.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.

And, above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Of all needs a book has, the chief need is to be readable.

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.

Above all else, never think you're not good enough.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.

I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him. 

In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it.