I’ll piously gather up the crumbs of your feasts and make a meal of them,” said Nora. “I’ll let you know how they taste.
But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.
Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic.
People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!
There is always a place for chance in things.
There’s no romance here but what you may have brought with you.
He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous.
The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself.
He said at another time that she had no heart; and he added in a moment that she had given it all away – in small pieces, like a frosted wedding-cake.
The golden bowl – as it was to have been.’ And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. ‘The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.
SHE COULDN’T have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm – or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The.
They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.
It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
She had taken his measure; he was made incorrigibly to try, irredeemably to fail – to be, in short, eternally defeated and eternally unaware. He wouldn’t rage he couldn’t, for the citadel might, in that case, have been carried by his assault; he would only spend his life in walking round and round it, asking everyone he met how in the name of goodness one did get in.
It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover – the way that there above all, where the princes and popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty had gone to his head. He.
He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being.
He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirs – nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties.
You were reserved for my future.
And the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.
I’ve been deceived too often; I’ve ceased to form attachments, to permit myself to feel attractions.