The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
Why can’t we agree to free each other? We made the.
But mind this, I don’t wish ‘ee to feel you owe me anything. Not I. What I do, I do. Sometimes I say I should be as glad as a bird to leave the place – for don’t suppose I’m content to be a nobody. I was made for better things.
You know what that feeling is,” continued Boldwood, deliberately. “A thing strong as death. No dismissal by a hasty letter affects that.
Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!
There is a certain degree and tone of light which tends to disturb the equilibrium of the senses, and to promote dangerously the tenderer moods; added to movement, it drives the emotions to rankness, the reason becoming sleepy and unperceiving in inverse proportion; and this light fell now upon these two from the disc of the moon. All the dancing girls felt the symptoms, but Eustacia most of all.
To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary of the offered: to care for the remote, to dislike the near: it was Wildeve’s nature always. This is the true mark of the man of sentiment.
I see your face in every scene of my dreams, and I hear your voice in every sound. I wish I did not. It is too much what I feel. They say such love never lasts.
They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had never expected to have.
The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.
O, if any man wants to make himself immortal by painting a picture of wretchedness, let him come here!
Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during.
Her supreme indifference added fuel to Manston’s ardour – it completely disarmed his pride. The invulnerable Nobody seemed greater to him than a susceptible Princess.
She thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and godlike was a composer’s power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.
People already feel that a man who lives without disturbing a curve of feature, or setting a mark of mental concern anywhere upon himself, is too far removed from modern perceptiveness to be a modern type. Physically beautiful men – the glory of the race when it was young – are almost an anachronism now; and we may wonder whether, at some time or other, physically beautiful women may not be an anachronism likewise.
The greater the sinner the greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian history to discover that.
The creeping plants about the old manor-house were bowed with rows of heavy water drops, which had upon objects behind them the effect of minute lenses of high magnifying power.
There was something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on – disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity.
However, we are very apt to think extremes of people. I shouldn’t wonder after all if it wasn’t a little of both – just between the two – rather cruelly used and rather reserved.
Wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions.
Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere of his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk, which Bathsheba’s presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally suspended.