Daniel Defoe

“ My new spouse and I lived a very regular, contemplative life, and in itself certainly a life filled with all human felicity. But if I looked upon my present situation with satisfaction, as I certainly did, so in proportion I on all occasions looked back on former things with detestation and with the utmost affliction ”

“ Sometimes the wonders of my present circumstances would work upon me, and I should have some raptures upon my soul upon the subject of my coming so smoothly out of the arms of hell, that I was not engulfed in ruin, as most who lead such lives are, first or last ”

“ As for me, I scarce saw it four times in the first four years of its life, and often wished it would go quietly out of the world; whereas a son which I had by the jeweller I took a different care of, and showed a differing concern for, though I did not let him know me, for I provided very well for him, had him put out very well to school, and when he came to years fit for it, let him go over with a person of honesty and good business to the Indies ”

“ This supposing us to have been so long married was not difficult at all in a country where we had been seen together about that time, viz. eleven years and a half before, and where we had never been seen afterwards till we now returned together; this being seen together was also openly owned, and acknowledged of course, by our friend the merchant at Rotterdam, and also by the people in the house where we both lodged, in the same city, and where our first intimacies began, and who, as it happened, were all alive ”