Even here is something sad and terrible. But the impression is fleeting, and serves only to give a greater acuteness to the enjoyment of the moment. It is like the sadness which you may see in the jester’s eyes when a merry company is laughing at his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in that communion of laughter he find himself more intolerably alone.
I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am ready to pay.
Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?
You should read Spanish,′ he said. ‘It is a noble tongue. It has not the mellifluousness of Italian – Italian is the language of tenors and organ-grinders – but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in a flood.
The Hindus would say that there was no beginning. The individual soul, co-existent with the universe, has existed from all eternity and owes its nature to some prior existence.
You are a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God.
Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium–smoker to his pipe. I.
My instinct told me I’d be silly to fall in love with him, you know women are very unfortunate, so often when they fall in love they cease to be lovable, and I made up my mind to be on my guard.
The best to be said for it is that when you’ve come to the conclusion that something is inevitable all you can do is to make the best of it.
He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.
For instance, he had a habit that poor Amy had a lot of trouble to break him of : after he’d finished his meat and vegetables he’d take a piece of bread and wipe the plate clean with it and eat it.” “Do you know what that means?” I said. “It means that for long he had so little to eat that he couldn’t afford to waste any food he could get.
He was no longer the awkward man of social intercourse, who was sufficiently conscious of his limitations not to talk of what he did not understand, and sincere enough not to express admiration for what he did not like.
I’ve got a rotten nature,” he said to himself. “I look forward to things awfully, and then when they come I’m always disappointed.
A laboratory had been fitted up, army classes were instituted; they all said the character of the school was changing. And heaven only knew what further projects Mr. Perkins turned in that untidy head of his.
Books can’t matter much if their authors themselves don’t think they matter.
Life was not so horrible if it was meaningless, and he faced it with a strange sense of power.
It is not very comfortable to have the gift of being amused at one’s own absurdity.
She had asked if he was good-looking. ‘No, I don’t think he is,’ answered Margaret, ‘but he’s very paintable.’ ‘That is an answer which has the advantage of sounding well and meaning nothing,’ smiled Susie. She.
I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change – change and the excitement of the unforeseen.
And they had a fairly pleasant time in Pretoria. Eventually, I believe, wars will be quite bloodless; rival armies will perambulate, and whenever one side has got into a good position, the other will surrender wholesale.