Pamela

“He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it. And in spite of this he felt that then, when his love was stronger, he could, if he had greatly wished it, have torn that love out of his heart; but now when as at that moment it seemed to him he felt no love for her, he knew that what bound him to her could not be broken.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?”
― Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

“I'm a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield