When you are some-‘one’, why would you wish to be some-‘thing’?
Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
I call on your pride. Remember what you’ve done, what you dream of doing, and rise up. Great Heavens, consider yourself with more respect!
The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice –.
Have you ever had the experience of finding in a book some vague idea that’s already occurred to you, some obscure image that comes back to you from the depths of your mind, or a perfect expression of your most subtle feelings?
Speech is a rolling machine that always stretches the feelings it expresses.
The countryside stretched flat as far as the eye could see; and the tufts of trees clustered around the farmhouses were widely spaced dark purple stains on the vast grey surface that merged at the horizon into the dull tone of the sky.
Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But.
She now felt an incessant and universal numbness.
The more ideas they had the more they suffered.
On the hill there was a poor old tramp wandering about with his stick, in among the carriages. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and a squashed beaver-hat, bent down into the shape of a bowl, concealed his face; but, when he took it off, he exposed, instead of eyelids, two yawning bloodstained holes. The flesh was tattered into scarlet strips; and fluid was trickling out, congealing into green crusts that reached down to his nose, with black nostrils that kept sniffing convulsively.
For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
This man, who was so experienced in love, couldn’t distinguish the dissimilarity in the emotions, behind the similarity of the expressions.
This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black curtain.
Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young.
She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.
What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day?
In her desire, she confused the sensual pleasures of luxury with the joys of the heart, elegance of manner with delicacy of feeling.
Poor human weakness! With your words, your languages, your sounds, you speak and stammer – you define God, the heaven and the earth, chemistry and philosophy, and you cannot express, with your language, all the joy that you derive from a naked woman – or a plum pudding.
Thy chastity is but a more subtle form of corruption, and thy contempt of this world is but the impotence of thy hatred against it.