What magic there is in a girl’s smile! It is the raisin which, dropped in the yeast of male complacency, induces fermentation.
You see, the catch about portrait-painting – I’ve looked into the thing a bit – is that you can’t start painting portraits till people come along and ask you to, and they won’t come and ask you to until you’ve painted a lot first.
Marriage isn’t a motion-picture close-up with slow fade-out on the embrace. It’s a partnership, and what’s the good of a partnership if your heart’s not in it? It’s like collaborating with a man you dislike...
Sir Thomas extended three fingers. Jimmy extended two, and the handshake was not a success.
New York is an egotist. It will suffer no divided attention. “Look at me!” says the voice of the city imperiously, and its children obey. It snatches their thoughts from their inner griefs, and concentrates them on the pageant that rolls unceasingly from one end of the island to the other. One may despair in New York, but it is difficult to brood on the past; for New York is the City of the Present, the City of Things that are Going On.
I’m dashed if I know what’s going to happen to me. I am the thingummy of what’s-its-name.” “You look it,” said Mike.
Lady Blunt had come up, flushed and triumphant, having left the solitary porter a demoralized wreck.
And then, just when I was beginning to think I might safely pop down in that direction and gather up the dropped threads, so to speak, time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it.
Until tonight I saw him only through the golden mist of love, and thought him the perfect man. This evening he revealed himself as what he really is – a satyr.
I suppose the cave-woman sometimes felt rather relieved when everything was settled for her with a club, but I’m sure the caveman must have had a hard time ridding himself of the thought that he had behaved like a cad and taken a mean advantage.
Hands up!’ said Mr Cootes with the uncouth curtness of one who has not had the advantages of a refined home and a nice upbringing.
The cheers of the multitude frequently act like a powerful drug upon young gentlemen with inferiority complexes.
He had reached that condition of mind which the old Vikings used to call Berserk and which among modern Malays is termed running amok.
It sometimes seems to me that in this life we’ve all got to have trouble sooner or later, and some of us gets it bit by bit, spread out thin, so to speak, and a few of us gets it in a lump – biff!
It’s a hell for the poor, in New York. An iron, grinding city. It frightens you. It’s so big and hard and cruel. It takes the fight out of you.
She paused, and heaved a sigh that seemed to come straight up from the cami-knickers. A silence ensued.
Lady Kimbuck’s eyes gleamed. She took the package eagerly. She never lost an opportunity of reading compromising letters. She enjoyed them as literature, and there was never any knowing when they might come in useful.
Cold is the ogre that drives all beautiful things into hiding.
She ignored my observation. This generally happens with me. Show me a woman, I sometimes say, and I will show you someone who is going to ignore my observations.
He stood looking at the detective like Schopenhauer’s butcher at the selected lamb.