Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woolen table-spread, a color at once strange and attractive, an obstinate color, a color that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead...
Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity.
No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.
New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows man had caged it with.
Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on.
No one will be much or little except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into...
Only the impossible lasts forever.
None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.
To think is to be sick...
Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.
For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.
Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy.
What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?
This head has risen above its hair in a moment of abandon known only to men who have drawn their feet out of their boots to walk awhile in the corridors of the mind.
We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn’t the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life’s lived before it gets to the parlor door.
Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.
The truth is how you say it, and to be ‘one’s self’ is the most shocking custom of all.
One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.
There’s something evil in me that loves evil and degradation – purity’s black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar’s door?