imagined quotes

Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if shehavethemisfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well she can†imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms.

-Jane Austen
  Northanger Abbey, ch.14.

I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do isgive an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.

- Anita Brookner
  A Family Romance, ch.7.

This monstrous mixture of imbecility, extravagance and political hysteria, better known as the Bill for the future government of Irelandthis farrago of superlative nonsense, is to be put in motion for this reason and no other: to gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry.

- Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
  Pamphlet attacking Gladstone's Home Rule Bill,  Jun.

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme whyare they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

- RobertTraill Spence,Jr Lowell
  Day by Day,'Epilogue'.

I am heartily glad you continued to like Waverley to the endthe hero is a sneaking piece of imbecilityand if he had married Flora she would have set him up upon the chimney-pieceas Count Boralaski'swifeusedto dowith him.

- Sir Walter Scott
  Letter toJohn Morritt, 28 Jul. Joseph Borowlaski was a Polish dwarf known as'The Little Count' who left France at the Revolution and exhibited himself at fairs throughout Britain.