"The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any history." "Oh, I'm not afraid of history!" She had been sure of that.

"Call it the bad part, if you like--yours certainly sticks out of you.

What was it else," Maggie Verver had also said, "that made me originally think of you?
It wasn't--as I should suppose you must have seen--what you call your unknown quantity, your particular self.

It was the generations behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the waste--the wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your family library are all about.

If I've read but two or three yet, I shall give myself up but the more--as soon as I have time--to the rest.
Where, therefore"-- she had put it to him again--"without your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been ?" He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned.