The more information one has about one’s dangers the better.
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.
At a time when his thoughts had been a good deal of a burden to him her sudden arrival, which promised nothing and was an open-handed gift of fate, had refreshed and quickened them, given them wings and something to fly for. Poor Ralph had been for many weeks steeped in melancholy; his outlook, habitually somber, lay under the shadow of a deeper cloud.
The broken charm of the world about was broken into smaller pieces.
I’ve thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I’m exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true.
People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.
But for a nice girl you do attract the most unnatural people.
Verdi’s music did little to comfort him, and he left the theatre and walked homeward, without knowing his way, through the torturous, tragic streets of Rome, where heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars.
She sat with him at any rate, in the grey clearance – as sad as a winter dawn – made by their meeting.
It’s very pleasant to be so well treated where one had least looked for it.
There were immensities between you.
Do you imagine I can see you suffer and not say a word?
But he’s all in a muddle about himself, his position, his power, and indeed about everything in the world. He’s the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know what to believe in.