Aunt Epp's Guide for Life

Unhappiness is caused by loss: either the loss of what you had and no longer have, or of what you never had and therefore feel the loss of, or the lack of. To avoid it, you must not wish for anything, which is impossible, as man cannot live by bread alone. Therefore to be human is to be unhappy. Accept it as your condition – and be content.

You will rest well enough when you are dead. For now keep active, and keep death waiting.

Read Dickens and Stevenson but not Thackeray and Trollope, unless you are sure of a long, tedious life.

They do not make good husbands but they do make excellent verses, so never marry a man with heroic aspirations. It is better to read about him afterwards, when he is famous, calm and dead.

But if you dream merely that someone you know has died, this usually means nothing at all, and you may put it from your mind.

To one quart of blackberry juice put one pound of white sugar, one tablespoonful of cloves, one of allspice, one of cinnamon, and one of nutmeg. Boil all together for a quarter of an hour; add a wineglass of whisky, brandy, or rum, depending on the taste of the sufferer, unless it be a child, in which case rum is to be preferred. Bottle while hot, cork tight and seal – this is a specific in diarrhoea, where corking and sealing is the desired effect.

And never mind what the old folks say about the mistletoe, that the pagans bowed the knee to it and that it was the forbidden tree in Eden, causing Adam’s death, and Balder’s too. Both died because of blindness and a woman, we are told, but the truth is that they died because of themselves, and the woman ends up with the blame, being easier to pick at than the mistletoe, which grows high.

Easter. Boil your bairns’ eggs in good strong thick tea, till they have gone a good, golden brown.

You will suffer from constipation, poor appetite, reduced affections, and the perennial ingratitude of friends and children. Your family will wait for you to die. That is when you may begin to wish, like Job, that you had been stillborn, and gone straight from the womb to the tomb.

they were the minority but they knew that a minority is always a majority if it has the power