Jake did not say anything; he looked up at the sky and the wall of gray mist ahead of us, he watched the stern of the Romanie lift sluggishly to the high sea. Dick, he said later, do you notice how sh...
Jacques Duval became a close friend of Marat, editor of L’Ami du Peuple, one of the most widely read and popular newspapers in Paris, and he used to send this down to us every week, so that we could k...
It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that.
It is strange how in moments of great crisis the mind whips back to childhood.
It has always seemed to me significant that Robert’s first memories, whenever he spoke of them, should not be of the farmhouse le Maurier, or of the lowing of cattle, the scratching of hens and other...
In December the first frosts came with the full moon, and then my nights of vigil held a quality harder to bear. There was a sort of beauty to them, cold and clear, that caught at the heart and made m...
If it must be so, let’s not weep nor complain If I have failed, or you, or life turned sullen. We have had these things, they do not come again, But the flag still flies and the city has not fallen. H...
I wondered straightaway how he could sit at peace there, of an evening, with the row of heads staring down at him. There were no pictures, no flowers: only the heads of chamois. The concession to melo...
I wondered if it was the same in every home, this feeling of exuberance when visitors had gone.
How am I to know? said Maria. People never tell one the truth, not the real truth. It may be all right tonight, and the notices may be good, and everybody be nice—but I shan’t really know. You’ll know...
Her face was not done, as Maria would have said. It was just her face. The skin was soft and smooth, and there were little lines at the corner of her eyes that did not show as a rule, and at the corne...
For me, the present agony of departure, the silent terror of leaving a place known to me if hated, the well-nigh impossible task of conquering the fear that possessed me. Not the fear of that hasty lo...
But the people enjoy watching the dog, he said swiftly, trying to divert Charles. That’s why they go to the circus, for distraction. Maria supplies the same drug in the theater, and I give it in large...
But he was quite eclipsed by one of the deputies of the Third Estate, a young lawyer called Robespierre—I wonder if Pierre has heard of him?—who suggested that the Archbishop would do better if he tol...
I have no talent for making new friends, but oh such genius for fidelity to old ones.
You’re a good girl, he said. I’m fond of you, Mary; you’ve got sense, and you’ve got pluck; you’d make a good companion to a man. They ought to have made you a boy.
You forget, those things were easy for me. I belonged to both of them. Niall pushed his cup back on the tray. What a bloody thing to say, he said, and he got up and lit another cigarette.
Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?
When anyone talked about beauty in that way I knew they were doing it for effect. Perhaps she wanted me to think she was intelligent. She had only to open her mouth to show me she was not.
We would make all sorts of promises to the cuisinière, and to the daily femme de chambre, saying, We’ll be back again next year, knowing in our hearts that it would not be so. We never took the same v...