Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience – or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.
Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation...
We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have.
The whole of anything, is never told.
Our relation, all round, exists – it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it.
The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was in having a mind of her own at all.
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.