Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.
Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.
(I suspose her funeral was a great event, certainly she was calm.!)
(Unfortunately every notices when the Monarch dies.)
“Being married gives one one's position like nothing else can.”
“I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.”
“What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine dear, but I own I cannot enter into that: I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments: when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic”
(Queen Victoria's advice to her daughters)
“Do not to let your feelings (very natural and usual ones) of momentary irritation and discomfort be seen by others; don't (as you so often did and do) let every little feeling be read in your face and seen in your manner . . .”
“The great event of the evening was Jenny Lind's appearance and her complete triumph. She has a most exquisite, powerful and really quite peculiar voice, so round, soft and flexible and her acting is charming and touching and very natural. I was quite moved!!”
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When I think of a merry, happy, free young girl -- and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife generally is doomed to -- which you can't deny is the penalty of marriage.
“He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting."(Sorry but you are his queen as well as wife.)
"The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two! My life as a happy one is ended! the world is gone for me! If I must live on (and I will do nothing to make me worse than I am), it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children -- for my unhappy country, which has lost all in losing him -- and in only doing what I know and feel he would wish.” (Not an excuse to have a little thing with your subject John Brown, tho...)
“An ugly baby is a very nasty object - and the prettiest is frightful.”
“I don't dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.”
“I am every day more convinced that we women, if we are to be good women, feminine and amiable and domestic, are not fitted to reign; at least it is they that drive themselves to the work which it entails.”