Andrea

“Would you - would you like to marry me, Kitty?' Lord Radcliffe - James - asked, voice like gravel.
She gave a helpless little laugh at the absurdity of the question - as if he did not know.
'I would,' she said. 'But first, I feel I must inform you that I come with four sisters, a badly leaking roof, and a veritable ocean of debt.'
He had started to smile now, and once begun it did not seem to stop, overtaking his whole face.
“I thank you for your honesty,’ he said cordially, and she laughed. ‘May I reassure you that I am desperate to meet your other sisters, the roof sounds charmingly rustic, and the debt does not faze me.’ He paused. ‘Of course, I understand that you will need to see my accounts before committing yourself,’ he went on, and she laughed again, loud and bright.
‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ she said. ‘As long as you can promise you’re absurdly rich and you’ll pay off all my family’s debts.’
‘I am absurdly rich,’ he repeated. ‘And I will pay off all your family’s debts.’
‘Why then by all means,’ she said, grinning up at him, ‘I would indeed like to marry you.”
― Sophie Irwin, A Lady's Guide to Fortune-Hunting

“Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming