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.
You must write for yourself, above all.
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.
The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.
This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by.
Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery.
A man, at least, is free; he can explore each passion and every kingdom, conquer obstacles, feast upon the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Both inert and yielding, against her are ranged the weakness of the flesh and the inequity of the law. Her will, like the veil strung to her bonnet, flutters in every breeze; always there is the desire urging, always the convention restraining.
I was resting in the shadow of that ideal happiness as in the shade of the poisonous manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences.
Rich or poor, victors or vanquished, I make no allowance for any of them. I don’t want love or hate, pity or anger. Sympathy is another matter. There is never enough of that.
She no longer existed.
Are you not tired as I am of waking up every morning and seeing the sun all over again? Tired of living the same life, suffering the same sorrow? Tired of desiring, and tired of being sated? Tired of waiting, and tired of possessing?
He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like any other of his mistresses, and the charm of novelty slipping off gradually like a peace of clothing revealed in his nakedness the eternal monotony of passion which always assumes the same form and uses the same languages. He could not perceive, this man of such broad experiences, the difference in feelings that might underlay similarities of expression.