# Quote — Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret

> We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial.

- Author: [Mary Elizabeth Braddon](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-elizabeth-braddon.md)
- Book: [Lady Audley's Secret](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-elizabeth-braddon/lady-audleys-secret.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mary_Elizabeth_Braddon#Lady_Audley's_Secret_(1862)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-elizabeth-braddon/lady-audleys-secret/we-are-apt

## More from this book

> Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-constrained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no color from the outer world.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-elizabeth-braddon/lady-audleys-secret/phoebe-marks-was.md)

> He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-elizabeth-braddon/lady-audleys-secret/he-forgot-that.md)

> The wind came whistling up across the frosty open country, and through the leafless woods, and rattled fiercely at the window-frames.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-elizabeth-braddon/lady-audleys-secret/the-wind-came.md)