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.
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.
If Quint – on your remonstrance at the time you speak of – was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another.
He was burdened, poor Strether – it had better be confessed at the outset – with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.
The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business, in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.
Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly ignored.
Well,” said Winterbourne, “when you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom; it doesn’t exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr. Giovanelli, and without your mother – ” “Gracious!
The image of the “presence,” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go – this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short – he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.
But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of sentiment.
Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon – the common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn’t come; but perhaps – as they would seemingly here be things quite other – this long ache might at last drop to rest.
I don’t think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day – perhaps.
No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of which – and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my feet – there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness.
I don’t do it!” I sobbed in despair; “I don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than I dreamed – they’re lost!” VIII.