He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.
I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Was n’t it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?
He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.
I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.
There’s no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won’t say that if you refuse me you’ll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine.
She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation.
She has only one fault; too many ideas.
This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it – doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it.
It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one’s language and of one’s time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier.
She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed... And she was dead, dead, dead.
I never know what I mean in my telegrams – especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive.
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.
He has depths of silence – which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it’s always something he has seen or felt for himself – never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never.
I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain – it can’t spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but I defy it to break you up.
And she really had tones to make justice weep.
Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one “would” have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things.
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.
I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.
What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as suspense – it was superseded by horrible proofs.