The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You’re not enough in contact with reality – with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you. You’re too fastidious; you’ve too many graceful illusions.
She was glad to pause, however, on the edge of this larger adventure; there was such a thrill even in the preliminary hovering.
It was in her disposition at all times to lose faith in the reality of absent things; she could summon back her faith, in case of need, with with an effort, but the effort was often painful even when the reality had been pleasant. The past was apt to look dead and its revival rather to show the livid light of a judgement-day.
However much you might watch me I should be watching you more.
She has a sort of old-fashioned character that’s passing away – a vivid identity.
Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.
To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumor kept her imagination awake.
But will they make themselves agreeable to me? That’s what I like people to do. I don’t hesitate to say so, because I always appreciate it.
Nothing could be happier, in general, than to seem dazzling, but she had a perverse unwillingness to glitter by arrangement.
I’m taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.
The more information one has about one’s dangers the better.
If you decline to understand me I wholly decline to understand you.
I don’t believe they’re very nice to girls; they’re not nice to them in the novels.
What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, forever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous.
But for me there are only two classes: the people I trust and the people I don’t.
You’re capable of anything, you and Osmond. I don’t mean Osmond by himself, and I don’t mean you by yourself. But together you’re dangerous – like some chemical combination.
I don’t know, upon my honour, what I’m doing.
Oh dear, I’m quite alone, I’ve nothing on earth to do.
He had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrapsed, of some complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate.
The vice in the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate.