It doesn’t matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.
You must not think my father valued me at less than a king’s ransom; but, at no more than a king’s ransom.
The touch of her hand filled me with a wild loneliness.
It was the beginning of an anxiety that would never end, except with the deaths of either or both; and anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but it is not compatible with innocence.
Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them...
The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy.
She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery, she must embrace tyranny.
Erl-King lives.
To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion.
He knew it was too late to turn back and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies.
And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption.
The more I saw of love, the less I liked the look of it.
Justine’s virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.
The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.
Fevvers felt that shivering sensation which always visited her when mages, wizards, impresarios came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention, as though they believed she depended on their imaginations n order to be a woman. She felt herself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea.
ESCAPING SLOWLY.
Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who seem always to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues.
There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to step over them.
At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.
Necessary connections are fabulous beasts.