It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other – for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended – the doors we had indiscreetly opened.
No,’ she sadly insisted – ’men don’t know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.
If you look for grand examples of anything from me, I shall disappoint you.
It was the tragic part of happiness; one’s right was always made of the wrong of some one else.
He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life.
I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly – last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth.
A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.
I might show it to you, but you’d never see it. The privilege isn’t given to every one; it’s not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.
It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?
We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us;.
From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.
I don’t talk for your amusement.
One’s theories, after all, matter little, it is one’s humor that is the great thing.
THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!
But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know.
The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries. Who can say beforehand that his will is strong? There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one’s will and one’s inclinations. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one’s organism, like the heart and the liver. I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig.
If she had troubles she must keep them to herself, and if life was difficult it would not make it easier to confess herself beaten.
Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whilst with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness.
She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.
When Milly smiled it was a public event – when she didn’t it was a chapter of history. They.