Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other’s character and moods without attempting to pry into each other’s history.
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.
Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
It troubled her much to see what a great flame a little wildfire was likely to kindle.
We have missed because we tried to miss, I suppose.
She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.
Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one...
In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked that she was, and forgot that the defective can more than the entire.
Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain.
If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now!
Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.
The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus – the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.
The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humourousness.
She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.
I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly.
He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner: call on the husband to look at the wife: be eager to pay and intend to owe.
The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.
The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.
He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon.