But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered – by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life.
By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.
Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.
That’s quite different. I told you I wouldn’t want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin’ generalities.
Sleep – real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby. So deep and warm the bed and the pillow enfolding me, letting me sink into peace, nothingness – my dreams now, after the catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair.
With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life.
You probably think you know... The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.
I’m afraid I’m in love with you and that’s not the best thing that could happen.
Sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal.
As he spoke there was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in ourselves.
Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.
Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty.
Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired to that June night.
Collis, unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: “I reckon I’m late – the beyed has flown.
As the conversation continued in stilted commas, Anthony wondered that to him and Bloeckman both this girl had once been the most stimulating, the most tonic personality they had ever known – and now the three sat like overoiled machines, without conflict, without fear, without elation, heavily enamelled little figures secure beyond enjoyment in a world where death and war, dull emotion and noble savagery were covering a continent with the smoke of terror. In.
It’s like lifting off in an airplane: you’re on the ground, on the ground, on the ground... and then you’re up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy, because it’s what I was made to do.
Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.
Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind.
Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter color of the room.