Date: 1768

"Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw--and 'tis thou who lifts him up to Heaven--eternal fountain of our feelings!--'tis here I trace thee--and this is thy divinity which stirs within...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"The old man rose up to meet me, and with a respectful cordiality would have me sit down at the table; my heart was sat down the moment I enter'd the room; so I sat down at once like a son of the family."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1770

"I acknowlege myself coxcomb enough to have been pleased with the conquest of a heart on which I set not the least value"

— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)

Date: 1770

"Mr. Falkland began with beseeching lord V--- to blot from his memory his past ill conduct, for which he expressed the sincerest contrition"

— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)

Date: 1770

"There were some passages in both your letters that plucked my very heart-strings"

— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)

Date: 1776

"I am provoked at this natural incapacity of conveying my sentiments to you; words are but a cloak, or rather a clog, to our ideas; there should be no curtain before the hearts of friends; and the longing I have ever felt for an intuitive converse, is to me a strong argument for a future state."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"A thousand disagreeable images rushed on my imagination, in that instant, I crushed their growth, and talked of India, of my other sisters, Lucy, and Mrs. Selwyn, and of you also, till we were summoned to the saloon, where supper was prepared for me."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"I have very uneasy apprehensions, tho' I hope they are not well founded, that Sir James Desmond's ruling passion is the love of play."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"The country, as the poets tell us, is the scene for love; the pleasing objects that surround us, the pureness of the air, but, above all, its stillness, harmonize the soul, and render it susceptible of every soft and tender feeling."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1776

"Their hearts are tied up in their purses."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)