I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say:...
How young and inexperienced I must have seemed, and how I felt it, too. One was too sensitive, too raw, there were thorns and pin-pricks in so many words that in reality fell lightly on air.
He was not staring at her anymore. He was still. He had gone. The moment of truth had vanished forever, and she would never know. What had happened was Then, was already past, in some other dimension...
He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive,...
And this then, that I am feeling now, is the hell that comes with love, the hell and the damnation and the agony beyond all enduring, because after the beauty and the loveliness comes the sorrow and t...
And so, the Colonel was saying, the Mandate was handed over to the U.N. in May, and we were all out of the country by July 1st. To my mind we should have stayed. The whole thing has been a bloody nons...
And she passed through the stage door and was inside the theater. Her heart was still beating fast, and her hands were burning, but she felt steadier suddenly, the feeling of panic had gone from her....
A mock trial was set in motion, and the mayor Montlibert forced to interrogate the prisoners. It was obvious, even to someone like myself who knew nothing of the law, that none of the men had done wro...
Kindness, and sincerity, and if I may say so modesty are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beauty in the world.
—No. Te estoy proponiendo que te cases conmigo, pequeña tontaina.
È un bene che non si ripeta due volte, la febbre del primo amore. Poiché è una febbre, e anche un fardello, checché ne dicano i poeti. Non si è molto coraggiosi, quando si ha ventun anno. Sono tempi p...
When speaking, Aunt Patience avoided her eyes, and the very fluency of her words was in itself suspicious. She spoke much as a child does who tells herself a story and has a talent for invention. It h...
The rank and melancholy smell of charred wet wood and sodden leaves coming towards me on a wisp of air.
It seemed to her that never before had she known there was malevolence in solitude. The very coach, which all the day had rocked her like a cradle, now held a note of menace in its creaks and groans....
Cannot give an honest traveler a bed for the night? For what other purpose was it built? And how do you live, if you have no custom? We have custom, returned the woman sullenly. I’ve told you that. Th...
But fate and circumstance had made me no more than a shadow in his life, a phantom of what might have been
Boredom is a pleasing antidote to fear.
You talked to me of being young, I said to Jake, you talked this evening on the bridge of losing something I would never understand. Don’t you see what all that has meant to me? I was a boy without th...
You have never lived anywhere else, he said, and you are not an individual at all, you’re just a hotch-potch of every character you’ve ever acted. Your mood and your personality change with each new p...
You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.