“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

“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

“Its highest pretensions are to be a simple moral tale.”

A modest statement of her literary aims and moral purpose · Preface to The Father and Daughter, 1801

• Art
• Truth