Tragedy

When Sir Robert Walpole was dismissed from all his employments he retired to Houghton and walked into the Library; when, pulling down a book and holding it some minutes before his eyes, he suddenly and seeming sullenly exchanged it for another. He held that about half as long, and looking out a third returned it instantly to its shelf and burst into tears. ‘I have led a life of business so long,’ said he, ‘that I have lost my taste for reading, and now -- what shall I do?’

Parental Reviews

The very first copy of The White Peacock that was ever sent out, I put into my mother’s hands, when she was dying. She looked at the outside, and then at the title-page, and then at me, with darkening eyes. And though she loved me so much, I think she doubted whether it could be much of a book, since no one more important than I had written it. Somewhere, in the helpless privacies of her being, she had wistful respect for me. But for me in the face of the world, not much… Anyway, she was beyond reading my first immortal work. It was put aside, and I never wanted to see it again. She never saw it again.
After the funeral, my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been [in] Hottentot.
‘And what dun they gie thee for that, lad?’
‘Fifty pounds, father.’
‘Fifty pounds!’ He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. ‘Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.’

--D. H. Lawrence

The Quest for Health

"He [Samuel Johnson] told me [Fanny Burney] that he was going to try what sleeping out of town might do for him. 'I remember,' said he. 'that my wife, when she was near her end, poor woman, was also advised to sleep out of town; and when she was carried to the lodgings that had been prepared for her, she complained that the staircase was in very bad condition, for the plaster was beaten off the walls in many places. 'Oh,' said the man of the house, 'that's nothing but by the knocks against it of the coffins of the poor souls that have died in the lodgings!' He laughed, but not without apparent secret anguish, when telling me this."