The Count himself was ready to die, and he would be glad to die here alone, without pretence and mockery, with no troop of expectant relatives about his bed. The world was not what he had thought it at twenty – or even at forty.
The children you don’t especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go.
The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over.
Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!’ she used to sing joyfully. ‘I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.
In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run.
Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even – a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content.
There are times when one’s vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down.
You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest.
Then you do not believe in progress?” “Change is not always progress, Monseigneur.
These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days, – the complexion, the special flavour, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life.
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. ‘I’d always be miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here.
The air is of silver and pearl, the night is liquid with moonlight.
It’s not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering... but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end.
It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.
I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.
She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.
He had been a fool to imagine it, but he was glad he had been a fool. She had given him one grand dream.
I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence – the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.
She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.