I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them.
And as her love revived, so did her capacity for suffering. Life, more important, grew more bitter.
Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.
Mr. Ansell was not merely a man of some education; he had what no education can bring – the power of detecting what is important. Like many fathers, he had spared no expense over his boy, – he had borrowed money to start him at a rapacious and fashionable private school; he had sent him to tutors; he had sent him to Cambridge. But he knew that all this was not the important thing. The important thing was freedom.
He never did his dumb-bells or played in his school fifteen. But the muscles came. He thinks they came while he was reading Pindar.
In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.
He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.
They described the strange feeling of peace that came over them when they handled the Book of the Machine, the pleasure that it was to repeat certain numerals out of it, however little meaning those numerals conveyed to the outward ear, the ecstasy of touching a button, however unimportant, or of ringing an electric bell, however superfluously.
How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself – hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth – their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.
She was no longer examining life, but being examined by it; she had become a real person.
I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere.
Your soul, dear Lucy! I hate the word now, because of all the cant with which superstition has wrapped it round. But we have souls, and I see you ruining yours. I cannot bear it.
Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world.
Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart; men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls; even men might suffer from unexplained desires, and need help.
Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing.
Are Indians cowards? No, but they are bad starters and occasionally jib. Fear is everywhere; the British Raj rests on it.
Here had lived an elder race, to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.
Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho–Yung thought Chi–Bo–Sing thought LafcadioHearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.
But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light...
Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery.