His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. After the terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who’d es...
His Raskolnikov eyes, like dead coals, were altogether of too fine cast – speaking too much blighted and heroic romanticism – for a poor shivering wretch such as himself.
Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.
Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real.
ESCAPING SLOWLY
But one story in this book, 'How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales', shows just how much fairy stories could change a woman's desires, and how much a man might fear that change, would go to a...
Below me, in spreading, concentric circles, like those a fish makes when it rises in still water, spun round the lower tiers; above me arched the black sky pierced by the gas jets of the stars.
And this was how the red people passed their time and amused themselves when they thought nobody was watching.
And the light, I must apologise for the lack of light... a hereditary affliction of the eyes…
A draught made the flames of the candles dance and the air grew thick with the smell of hot wax. Marianne's eyes had grown more and more accustomed to the candlelight and she made out knobs and swags...
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
The heart’s egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another’s place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism a...
Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to venture out late,...
Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.
I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of sentient vegetable, like one of those cob...
Her face. And she smiling. For a moment, just that moment, you would have thought it was May morning.
Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who seem always to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues.
Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!
Finn is Daddy,' said Victoria with fat satisfaction.'Not yet,' said Finn. 'But we'll christen the first one Proximity.'Melanie choked on a mouthful.
Everything went black in the shocking folds of his embrace. She was very startled and near to sobbing.'Caw, caw,' echoed his raincoat.'Don't be frightened,' he said. 'It is only poor Finn, who will do...