She sometimes felt a sort of passion of tenderness for memories which had led no other merit than that they belonged to her unmarried life.
Do you know I sometimes think that I’m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.
Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.
I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm.
His very quietness was part of it now, as always part of everything, of his success, his originality, his modesty, his exquisite public perversity, his inscrutable incalculable energy; and this quality perhaps it might be – all the more too as the result, for the present occasion, of an admirable traceable effort – that placed him in her eyes as no precious work of art probably had ever been placed in his own.
Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates.
This impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier intervals, they had only themselves to regard, and when her companion’s inveteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting too familiarly that in addition to being important she was also sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of decorum. It.
We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger.
There may be unselfish natures, there may be disinterested feelings.
Even iron sometimes melts.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my horrid plunge.
There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the business seems to me to have been all pure suffering.
His mind contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the light breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass.
I was on the point of saying that a happy chance had favoured him, but it occurs to me that one is under no obligation to call chances by flattering epithets when they have been waited for so long.
She believed me, I was sure, absolutely; if she hadn’t I don’t know what would have become of me, for I couldn’t have borne the strain alone.
I don’t approve of myself in the least. Sometimes it comes over me – how I should object to myself if I were not myself.
She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.
She hadn’t given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was the last word, would end with a sort of meaning.
The vanity of women had long memories, but she was making no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake.
It was practically the end of everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a moment in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry.