She was all too sunk in the inevitable, and the abysmal.
It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar.
For it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself.
Don’t people always feel better just before the end?
She was too young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted with pain.
A great many people give me the impression of never having for a moment felt anything.
With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted corners.
She longed for opportunities, but these were not the opportunities she meant.
The old-world quality in everything that she now saw had all the charm of strangeness.
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.
If you decline to understand me I wholly decline to understand you.