“Mine has been a lonely lot through life; but I have never felt it painfully so; and I believe the happiest persons are those who have the fewest wants.”

A late-life reflection connecting contentment with simplicity and few demands · Private note, 18 May 1852

• Joy
• Solitude

“I am very thankful for what I can do, and I do not repine at what I can't do; and life flies only too fast.”

Acceptance of physical limitation without surrendering gratitude for life · Letter to Miss Gurney, 5 March 1852

• Hope
• Mortality
• Time

“It is, indeed, a great favour to be permitted to enjoy life still, so much as I do, in company; but it is a far greater one to be able to enjoy equally my lonely hours.”

Valuing the ability to find equal pleasure in companionship and solitude · Private note, late 1840s

• Friendship
• Joy
• Solitude

“If I did not love to be alone, and enjoy the privileges leisure gives, what would have become of me!—but I love my lot, and every year it grows dearer still.”

A mature affirmation of solitude as something sustaining rather than empty · Letter, 9 January 1844

• Joy
• Solitude
• Time

“It is grievous to make acquaintances with people, learn to love and admire them, and then bid them farewell for ever!”

The sadness of friendship made transient by distance and mortality · Private note, 12 July 1843

• Death
• Friendship

“My trials are afflictive to nature; but I have long known and experienced that there is support in entire submission to God's will, in little as well as in great trials.”

Locating endurance in acceptance during both ordinary and severe difficulties · Private note, early 1840s

• Faith
• Hope

“Life, indeed, ought to be a constant state of preparation for death; but few make it so, and I feel I have not so done.”

A sober acknowledgement of mortality and the difficulty of living with it constantly in mind · Private reflection, 1834

• Death
• Life
• Mortality

“Take care of indulging in little selfishnesses; learn to consider others in trifles; be careful to fulfil the minor social duties.”

Arguing that character is formed through small everyday acts of consideration · Pocket-book note, c. 1838

• Friendship
• Truth

“If writing were even an effort to me, I should not now be alive, but must have been absolument epuisée; and it might have been inserted in the bills of mortality—"dead of letter-writing, A. Opie.”

Her memorable joke about the extraordinary volume of her correspondence · Letter to Emily Taylor, 1849

• Art
• Joy
• Mortality

“Oh! the exquisite beauty of the prisms on my ceiling just now, it is a pleasure to exist only to look at it.”

A spontaneous expression of delight in colour and simple visual beauty · Private note, c. 1836

• Beauty
• Joy

“But I am returned; good things more endeared to me than ever; and when I saw Calais to-day, and remembered what I was when I first saw it, in 1802, I felt overwhelmed and humbled with a sense of being richer, wiser, and happier.”

Looking back across decades and measuring the inward changes of a lifetime · Travel journal, 2 November 1835

• Joy
• Memory
• Time

“I always admire the ocean most when there are no vessels whatever on its waves; and the solitude, stillness, and depopulation of the Highlands, were to me, heighteners of their charms.”

Finding landscape most powerful when human activity recedes from view · Scottish travel journal, 1834

• Beauty
• Nature
• Solitude

“How congenial to the Highlands are solitude and silence!”

A succinct response to the solemn beauty of the Highland landscape · Scottish travel journal, 1834

• Beauty
• Nature
• Solitude

“Why is it one lingers, as if reluctant to leave a scene of powerful and even painful emotion? It must be from the love of excitement; a love which few outgrow.”

Reflecting on the human attraction to places charged with painful emotion · Scottish travel journal, 1834

• Memory
• Truth

“Oh! the ever-varying beauty of the ocean. I think I must live near it whenever I fix again.”

Her delight in the sea expressed with characteristic immediacy · Journal, 28 February 1833

• Beauty
• Nature

“It was interesting to watch the lights from the habitations, far and near, as they gradually disappeared; and to feel that I, probably, was the only being awake and moving, in that vast space of land and water.”

A vivid moment of solitary wakefulness amid sea, darkness and distant human life · Letter to Thomas Brightwell, 11 February 1833

• Nature
• Solitude

“How I wish I were, what I am not, and fear I never may be, weaned from the pleasures of this life, and given only to preparation for another!”

An unusually candid admission of the tension between earthly happiness and religious aspiration · Journal, 1832

• Faith
• Joy
• Mortality

“Rocks and sea do not lose, but gain, in beauty and sublimity, from rough weather.”

Finding heightened beauty in nature when it becomes wild and turbulent · Letter to Sarah Rose, 26 November 1832

• Beauty
• Nature

“I cannot express my delight at feeling that I have fourteen hours before me when I rise, or more, to do what I will in, and write and read as I choose.”

Delighting in an uninterrupted day devoted to reading and writing · Letter to Sarah Rose, 14 January 1833

• Art
• Joy
• Solitude

“Oh! what a blessing is leisure, and its promoter, solitude!”

A compact celebration of the creative freedom afforded by solitude · Letter to Sarah Rose, 14 January 1833

• Solitude
• Time

“I expect to be alone all to-day—what a great privilege it is, not to feel solitude a trial, but a pleasure!”

Treating the capacity for contented solitude as a genuine privilege · Paris journal, 1830

• Joy
• Solitude

“I humbly hope I shall be enabled to pray for my friends there, which is all I can do.”

A restrained response to anxiety for friends amid political violence · Letter from Norwich, 2 August 1830

• Faith
• Friendship
• War

“It so overpowered me, that I could not read it through at first, and wept because the eye it would most have pleased, would not see it.”

Literary praise becomes poignant because a beloved witness was no longer alive · Remark on Southey's Colloquies, 1829

• Art
• Death
• Memory

“I have had pleasing and gratifying things to relate; but, alas! he, to whom the relation would have given such pleasure, is gone; and even on the instant my pleasure has been swallowed up in pain.”

Capturing how bereavement can suddenly transform pleasure into grief · Letter, 29 June 1827

• Death
• Memory