When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness - as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.
When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed.
What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.
To begin with, I hate these new-fangled intermediate meals. Why can't people eat enough at luncheon to last till dinner?
The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.
The light of the October afternoon lay on an old high-roofed house which enclosed in its long expanse of brick and yellowish stone the breadth of a grassy court filled with the shadow and sound of lim...
The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppe...
She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted; and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the ex...
She was something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.
She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain...
She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation...
She made no answer, and he went on: What’s the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It’s beyond human enduring—that’s all.
She is still a bundle of engaging possibilities rather than a finished picture. Of the mother there is nothing to say, for that excellent lady evidently requires familiar surroundings to bring out suc...
She could only gather, from the silences and evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up—a woman who was of course dreadful, and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort of shadowy...
She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as if they were being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss.
Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;
Only, I wonder - the thing one's so certain of in advance; can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions....
It seems so to me, said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.