“For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty; the Polish jimkes on their grain ships had beauty; the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people held no appeal for me at all. Bourgeois life on the whole seemed to me pedantic.”

"Sonnet I" in The Galaxy Vol. XIX, (January - June 1875), p. 747.
Context: Sudden thy silent beauty on me shone,
Fair as the moon had given thee all her spell.
Then, as Endymion had found on earth,
In unchanged beauty but in fashion changed,
Her whom I loved so long; so felt I then,
Not that a new love in my heart had birth,
But that the old, that far from reach had ranged,
Was now on earth, and to be loved of men.

Source: The Bluest Eye

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

The interest of my son is the only guide I have, and whatever happiness I could achieve by being free of this place I cannot consent to separate my self from him. I could not have any pleasure in the world if I abandoned my children.I do not even have any regrets.
Marie Antoinette to the Chevalier Jarjayes on his persuading her to escape alone from the Tower; Lettres, II. p. 433; also quoted in Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001) by Antonia Fraser, ISBN 0307277747.

Source: Castle in the Air

Quote in an undated letter to Alleta de Jongh, Paris, c. Spring 1912; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 243, note 61
1910's

Source: To the Lighthouse