A useful education served women best, More thought. To ‘learn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman.’ Yet, when beauty is all that is expected or desired in a woman, she is left with nothing in its absence. It ‘is a most severe trail for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources,’ she argued.

— Karen Swallow Prior

Besides, we were fifteen, and we couldn't get our feelings to match up with our brains. So we went with our feelings.

— Karen Swallow Prior

…evangelicals were instrumental in advancing the ideal of companion ate marriage, one built on shared faith and mutual affection, a revolutionary notion in an era in which forced marriages were a not-so-distant memory.

— Karen Swallow Prior

Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts—eighteenth-century Reader’s Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain.” Good books, in contrast, require good readers: “In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.

— Karen Swallow Prior

From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.

— Karen Swallow Prior

Her shift in thinking was clearly conflicted. It must have been difficult to disavow something for which she had a deep love and in which she had been immersed so much of her life.

— Karen Swallow Prior

Honor, More charged, 'is the religion of tragedy.' Emotions such as love, hate, ambition, pride, and jealousy, 'form a dazzling system of worldly morality,' which contradicts 'the spirit of that religion whose characteristics are charity, meekness, peacefulness, long suffering, gentleness, forgiveness.

— Karen Swallow Prior

I am so afraid that strangers with think me good! And there is a degree of hypocrisy in appearing much better than one is.” - Hannah More

— Karen Swallow Prior

I believe in a God who not only intervenes in human affairs--again and again--but one who also makes banquets out of stale bread.

— Karen Swallow Prior

It is so easy to practice a creditable degree of so seeming virtue, and so difficult to purify and direct the affections of the heart, that I feel myself in continual danger of appearing better than I am; and I verily believe it is possible to make one’s whole life a display of splendid virtue and agreeable qualities, without ever setting foot towards the narrow path, or even one’s face towards the strait gate.” – Hannah More

— Karen Swallow Prior