"To impress others we must be earnest; to amuse them, it is only necessary to be kindly and fanciful."

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There can be - there ought to be - no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.

— Dinah Maria Murlock Craik