They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.
To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.
Lucy was slow to follow what people said, but quick enough to detect what they meant. She missed Cecil’s epigram, but grasped the feeling that prompted it.
He was thinking of the irony of friendship – so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream.
Something had changed. He had journeyed – as on rare occasions a man must – till he stood behind right and wrong. On the banks of the grey torrent of life, love is the only flower.
Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense –the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.
I had no right to move out of my books and music, which was what I did when I met you.
She had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged.
How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.
The ethereal past had blinded him, and the highest happiness he could dream was a return to it.
I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure.
No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.
He is rather a peculiar man.” Again he hesitated, and then said gently: “I think he would not take advantage of your acceptance, nor expect you to show gratitude. He has the merit – if it is one – of saying exactly what he means. He has rooms he does not value, and he thinks you would value them. He no more thought of putting you under an obligation than he thought of being polite. It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
I do not consider her choice of a piece happy. Beethoven is so usually simple and direct in his appeal that it is sheer perversity to choose a thing like that, which, if anything, disturbs.
This is Ahab, that’s Jezebel,” said Evie, who was one of those who name animals after the less successful characters of Old Testament history.
But books meant so much for him he forgot that they were a bewilderment to others.
It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.
Helen says it alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas – just imagine it! – rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them.
Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue.
Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere.