Take things more easily. Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much – it will get out of tune, like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a rosebud. Live as you like best, and your character will form itself.
So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. “And what did the former governess die of? – of so much respectability?” Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t anticipate.
You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said ‘Why not?’ to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto.
Oh, it was a trap – not designed but deep – to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever in me was most excitable.
He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.
The church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a little graveyard. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep, as they slanted into the grass.
She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her.
My dear young lady,′ said her distinguished friend, ‘isn’t “to live” exactly what I’m trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?
When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself.
I would live for you still – if I could.” Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying. “But I can’t!” she said as she raised them again to take leave of him. She couldn’t indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom.
Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast – so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech.
You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.
I didn’t refuse often enough.
Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravagant curve of the globe.
We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don’t mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common – having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.
I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority – which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters – turn infallibly to the vindictive.
They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn’t been something else with it. It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.
Wasn’t history full of the destruction of precious things?
I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies – in great towns and great crowds. It’s a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge “squash”, as we elegantly call it – an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.