Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her.
There was simply the sense that she had found wings, and meant to use them.
Their color slowly faded from out of the flowers; but their scent lingered to honey the air he breathed.
Helen forgot people. They were husks that had enclosed her emotion.
You only care about the things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the following order: Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all.
Both times it was loneliness, and the night, and panic afterwards.
She and the victim seemed alone in a world of unreality, and she loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
God, being altogether too large an order, did not worry him: he could not conceive of any censure being more terrific than, say, Joey Fetherstonhaugh’s, who kept in the rooms below, or of any Hell as bitter as Coventry.
It was the hour of unreality – the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real.
There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
She could not have believed that stones, a Loggia, a fountain, a palace tower, would have such significance. For a moment she understood the nature of ghosts.
He did not know that he talked a good deal of nonsense, and that the sheer force of his intellect was weakened by the sight of Monteriano, and by the thought of dentistry within those walls.
One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her – that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy.
The abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love.
He had not the knack of surrounding himself with nice people – indeed, for a man of ability and virtue his choice had been singularly unfortunate; he had no guiding principle beyond a certain preference for mediocrity;.
They wished that they also knew Italian, for our phrases of approval and of amazement are so connected with little occasions that we fear to use them on great ones. We are obliged to become vaguely poetic, or to take refuge in Scriptural reminiscences.
The story that is a story and sounded so healthy and stood no nonsense cannot sincerely lead to any conclusion but the grave.
Philip said slowly, “What about a thousand lire?
Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome ‘nerves’ or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.