Poor Catherine’s dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far.
Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong.
She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.
His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.
I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them – I don’t believe they are as eternal as the poets say.
What is character but the determination of incident?
Oh,” said Catherine, with some eagerness, “it doesn’t take long to like a person – when once you begin.
We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one’s self?
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature.
He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.
The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma.
The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.
He’s the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know what to believe in.
There is no generosity without sacrifice.
What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child’s part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.
I keep a band of music in my ante-room,” he said once to her. “It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing’s going on within.
There are no themes so human as those that reflect the closeness of bliss to bale.
Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn’t worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots.
It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.