Moll Flanders quotes

perhaps, after my death, it may be better known; at present it would not be proper, no, not though a general pardon should be issued, even without exceptions and reserve of persons or crimes.

It is enough to tell you, that as some of my worst comrades, who are out of the way of doing me harm (having gone out of the world by the steps and the string, as I often expected to go), knew me by the name of Moll Flanders, so you may give me leave to speak of myself under that name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am.

I have been told that in one of our neighbour nations, whether it be in France or where else I know not, they have an order from the king, that when any criminal is condemned, either to die, or to the galleys, or to be …

“Poor child! it won’t keep you,” says she; “it will hardly keep you in victuals.”

“Then I will have no victuals,” says I, again very innocently; “let me but live with you.”

“Why, can you live without victuals?” says she.

It will not be strange if I now began to think, but alas! it was but with very little solid reflection.

I had a most unbounded stock of vanity and pride, and but a very little stock of virtue.

I did indeed case sometimes with myself what young master aimed at, but thought of nothing but the fine words and the gold; whether he intended to marry me, or not to marry me, seemed a matter of no great consequence to me;

“Fie, brother!” says the second sister, “how can you talk so? Would you take a creature that has not a groat in the world?”

“Prithee, child,” says Robin, “beauty’s a portion, and good-humour with it is a double portion; I wish thou hadst half her stock of both for thy portion.”

So there was her mouth stopped.

and as to his promises of marriage, the nature of things, he said, had put an end to that, by the probability of my being his brother’s wife, before the time to which his promises all referred.

Thus, in a word, I may say, he reasoned me out of my reason

; he conquered all my arguments, and I began to see a danger that I was in, which I had not considered of before, and that was, of being dropped by both of them and left alone in the world to shift for myself.

and I kept true to this notion, that a woman should never be kept for a mistress that had money to keep herself.

Thus my pride, not my principle, my money, not my virtue, kept me honest

; though, as it proved, I found I had much better have been sold by my she-comrade to her brother, than have sold myself as I did to a tradesman that was rake, gentleman, shopkeeper, and beggar, all together.

and thus having lived like quality indeed, as to expense, we went away for Northampton, and, in a word, in about twelve days’ ramble came home again, to the tune of about £93 expense.

Vanity is the perfection of a fop.

My husband had this excellence, that he valued nothing of expense;

and my condition was very odd, for though I had no child (I had had one by my gentleman draper, but it was buried), yet

I was a widow bewitched; I had a husband and no husband

, and I could not pretend to marry again, though I knew well enough my husband would never see England any more, if he lived fifty years. Thus, I say, I was limited from marriage, what offer might soever be made me;

… and other people’s charity, yet while a penny lasted, nay, even beyond it, endeavouring to drown themselves, labouring to forget former things, which now it was the proper time to remember, making more work for repentance, and sinning on, as a remedy for sin past.

But it is none of my talent to preach; these men were too wicked, even for me.

There was something horrid and absurd in their way of sinning, for it was all a force even upon themselves; they did not only act against conscience, but against nature;

on the contrary, he must think her the weakest of all creatures in the world, as the rate of men now goes.

In short, he must have a very contemptible opinion of her capacities, nay, every of her understanding, that, having but one case of her life, shall call that life away at once, and make matrimony, like death, be a leap in the dark.

I would fain have the conduct of my sex a little regulated in this particular, which is the thing in which, of all the parts of life, I think at this time we suffer most in;

and if they did not marry so soon as they may do otherwise, they would make themselves amends by marrying safer.

She is always married too soon who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late who gets a good one

; in a word, there is no woman, deformity or lost reputation excepted, but if she manages well, may be married safely one time or other; but if she precipitates herself, it is ten thousand to one but she is undone.

… trust them with tools and clothes and other necessaries, upon the credit of their crop before it is grown, so they again plant every year a little more than the year before, and so buy whatever they want with the crop that is before them.

“Hence, child,” says she, “man a Newgate-bird becomes a great man, and we have,” continued she, “several justices of the peace, officers of the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt in the hand.”

She was going on with that part of the story, when her own part in it interrupted her, and with a great deal of good-humoured confidence she told me she was one of the second sort of inhabitants herself;

I cannot say that I was right in point of policy in carrying it such a length, while at the same time I did not resolve to discover the thing to him; but

I am giving an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be.

In their directly opposite opinion to one another my mother and I continued a long time, and it was impossible to reconcile our judgments; many disputes we had about it, but we could never either of us yield our own, or bring over the other.

… conscience for the life I led, and that even in the greatest height of the satisfaction I ever took, yet I had the terrible prospect of poverty and starving, which lay on me as a frightful spectre, so that there was no looking behind me.

But as poverty brought me into it, so fear of poverty kept me in it,

and I frequently resolved to leave it quite off, if I could but come to lay up money enough to maintain me. But these were thoughts of no weight, and whenever he came to me they vanished;

and above all, I had nobody to whom I could in confidence commit the secret of my circumstances to, and could depend upon for their secrecy and fidelity; and

I found by experience, that to be friendless is the worst condition, next to being in want that a woman can be reduced to

: I say a woman, because ’tis evident men can be their own advisers, and their own directors, and know how to work themselves out of difficulties and into business better than women;

but as this was the first time that ever I could imagine him weak enough to be in earnest in this affair, I did not use to say Yes at first asking; I would consider of it.

I played with this lover as an angler does with a trout.

I found I had him fast on the hook, so I jested with his new proposal, and put him off. I told him he knew little of me, and bade him inquire about me;

She took me short, and told me that was none of her business; all the ladies that came under her care were married women to her.

“Every woman,” she says, “that is with child has a father for it,”

and whether that father was a husband or no husband, was no business of hers; her business was to assist me in my present circumstances, whether I had a husband or no.

… the coach not to its full extent, but to a place called Stone, in Cheshire, I think it is, where I not only had no manner of business, but not so much as the least acquaintance with any person in the town or near it.

But I knew that with money in the pocket one is at home anywhere;

so I lodged there two or three days, till, watching my opportunity, I found room in another stagecoach, and took passage back again for London, sending a letter to my gentleman that I should be such a certain day at Stony-Stratford, where the coachman told …

If ever I had a grain of true repentance for a vicious and abominable life for twenty-four years past, it was then.

Oh, what a felicity is it to mankind, said I to myself, that they cannot see into the hearts of one another!

How happy had it been for me if I had been wife to a man of so much honesty, and so much affection from the beginning!

But there are temptations which it is not in the power of human nature to resist, and few know what would be their case if driven to the same exigencies.

As covetousness is the root of all evil, so poverty is, I believe, the worst of all snares.

But I waive that discourse till I come to an experiment.

but still when I looked before me, my very heart would sink within me at the inevitable approach of misery and want.

Oh let none read this part without seriously reflecting on the circumstances of a desolate state, and how they would grapple with mere want of friends and want of bread;

it will certainly make them think not of sparing what they have only, but of looking up to heaven for support, and of the wise man’s prayer, “Give me not poverty, lest I steal.”

but that went off after a while. Well, I went to bed for that night, but slept little; the horror of the fact was upon my mind, and

I knew not what I said or did all night, and all the next day.

Then I was impatient to hear some news of the loss; and would fain know how it was, whether they were a poor body’s goods, or a rich.

so I drank my ale, called to pay, and as I went away I said, “Take care of your plate, child,” meaning a silver pint mug, which he brought me drink in.

The boy said, “Yes, madam, very welcome,” and away I came.

I came home to my governess, and now I thought it was a time to try her, that if I might be put to the necessity of being exposed, she might offer me some assistance.

but I say, I had not so much as the least inclination to leave off; no, not so much as I had before when I had but £200 beforehand, and when I had no such frightful examples before my eyes as these were.

From hence ’tis evident to me, that when once we are hardened in crime, no fear can affect us, no example give us any warning.

I had indeed one comrade whose fate went very near me for a good while, though I wore it off too in time. That case was indeed very unhappy.

I could fill up this whole discourse with the variety of such adventures, which daily invention directed to, and which I managed with the utmost dexterity, and always with success.

At length⁠—as when does the pitcher come safe home that goes so very often to the well?⁠—I fell into some small broils

, which though they could not affect me fatally, yet made me known, which was the worst thing next to being found guilty that could befall me.

The moral, indeed, of all my history is left to be gathered by the senses and judgment of the reader; I am not qualified to preach to them.

Let the experience of one creature completely wicked, and completely miserable, be a storehouse of useful warning to those that read.

I am drawing now towards a new variety of the scenes of life.

I seemed not to mourn that I had committed such crimes, and for the fact as it was an offence against God and my neighbour, but I mourned that I was to be punished for it.

I was a penitent, as I thought, not that I had sinned, but that I was to suffer, and this took away all the comfort, and even the hope of my repentance in my own thoughts.

I got no sleep for several nights or days after I came into that wretched place, and glad I would have been for some time to have died there, though I did not consider dying as it ought to be considered neither;

… waters in the cavities and hollows of mountains, which petrify and turn into stone whatever they are suffered to drop on, so the continual conversing with such a crew of hellhounds as I was, had the same common operation upon me as upon other people.

I degenerated into stone; I turned first stupid and senseless, then brutish and thoughtless, and at last raving mad as any of them were

; and, in short, I became as naturally pleased and easy with the place, as if indeed I had been born there.

My temper was touched before, the hardened, wretched boldness of spirit which I had acquired abated, and conscious in the prison, guilt began to flow in upon my mind.

In short, I began to think, and to think is one real advance from hell to heaven.

All that hellish, hardened state and temper of soul, which I have said so much of before, is but a deprivation of thought; he that is restored to his power of thinking, is restored to himself.

and therefore I shall make no comments upon the sentence, nor upon the choice I was put to.

We shall all choose anything rather than death, especially when ’tis attended with an uncomfortable prospect beyond it, which was my case.

The good minister, whose interest, though a stranger to me, had obtained me the reprieve, mourned sincerely for this part.

… offered him, that he was scared yet himself, was so revived with the account that I gave him of the reception we were like to have in the ship, that he was quite another man, and new vigour and courage appeared in his very countenance.

So true is it, that the greatest of spirits, when overwhelmed by their afflictions, are subject to the greatest dejections, and are the most apt to despair and give themselves up.

After some little pause to recover himself, my husband came up with me, and gave the mate thanks for the kindness, which he had expressed to us, and sent suitable acknowledgment by him to the captain, offering to pay him by advance, whatever he demanded …