Turn your thoughts to novel writing–narrative, let it be about what it will, is read, because the mind quietly acquiesces, and it requires no trouble to think about it. On your part it will demand much less care in the composition. Never mind improbabilities–put together a sufficient number of facts–the more unlikely the better. If you are too idle to choose the trouble of inventing, collect eight or nine of the most popular works of that sort; take a piece of one, and a piece of another, and put them together, only a little altered, just to disguise them: never mind whether what the painters call keeping, can in this motley assemblage be attended to; nobody thinks about that: sprinkle the whole plentifully with horrors of some sort or other, to stimulate the languid attention, and you will have a certainty of a sale at least among the circulating libraries, which, after all, is the principal sale that can be expected; for who buy novels?– Who indeed buy books at all in these times?. Charlotte Turner Smith
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  1. Ah! candid and unadulterated mind! you have learned early to reflect; but take care lest this habit, hitherto so well applied, should totally unfit you for society. It will strew thorns in your path, while other young women of your age seek only flowers. By...
  2. I have heard that all ideas of equality are visionary–that they can never be realized–and I believe it. But surely, though there must be hewers of wood, and drawers of water, they ought to have the absolute necessaries of life.
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  5. I might, indeed, read history; but whenever I attempt to do so, I am to tell you the truth, driven from it by disgust– What is it, but a miserably mortifying detail of crimes and follies?–of the guilt of a few, and the sufferings of...
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