Rhoda Broughton

“I must try and be good, or clever, or eccentric, for it was very evident that pretty I could never be”
― Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up As a Flower

“Great kingdoms grew into being in the old times, at least we suppose so, we having now nothing of them but their dark old tombs. Big men did big things, and might as well never have done them for all we know about them, seeing that they rot now in such unrescued, irrecoverable oblivion. Even the most learned of our pundits in the historical and antiquarian line have but the most shadowy impression of what brave deeds were done, of what wise thoughts were thought, of how men lived and loved, and believed and hoped that dim far dawning. As for the bulk of us ignoramuses or ignorami (as I suppose would be the correct plural), it is a great chance if we know the names of the four great empires that people talk so much about nowadays. But”
― Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well [annotated]