“How I pity those whose childhood has been unhappy! to them one of the sweetest springs of feeling has been utterly denied, the most green and beautiful part of life laid waste.”
The Improvisatrice (1824)
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Letitia Elizabeth Landon 785
English poet and novelist 1802–1838Related quotes

Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)
Context: The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

“My whole life has been a waste - I've been a failure.”
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2005-06-02-tyson-saraceno_x.htm
On himself

“My life has been a total waste.”
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/showbiz/article-11621981-details/I'm+a+street+bum,+says+broke+Tyson/article.do;jsessionid=dZGvFJZGkLvsnbWWXZrVhsZ2kJlny8kkygtqYThr5ZL2nyWzmSjJ!-686754952
On himself

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

On the role of humor in her personal life, p. 10.
Autobiography

“The beauty of nature has been one of the great inspirations in my life.”

Comment of late 1788 or early 1789 upon his slaves http://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/the-only-unavoidable-subject-of-regret/, as recorded by David Humphreys, in his notebooks on his conversations with Washington, now in the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia<!-- as quoted in "Housing and Family Life of the Mount Vernon Negro," unpublished paper by Charles C. Wall, prepared for the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association (May 1962), prefatory note]. -->
1780s
Context: The unfortunate condition of the persons, whose labour in part I employed, has been the only unavoidable subject of regret. To make the Adults among them as easy & as comfortable in their circumstances as their actual state of ignorance & improvidence would admit; & to lay a foundation to prepare the rising generation for a destiny different from that in which they were born; afforded some satisfaction to my mind, & could not I hoped be displeasing to the justice of the Creator.