Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn't it a sufficient condemnation of society to find one's self accepting such phraseology?
What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?
Well--watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favorite sport of the angels, but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.
Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection,
Their types were familiar enough to Ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness.
The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.
The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlig...
The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the cravin...
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into...
The feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscio...
That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.
Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.
Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself...
She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.
She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.
She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.
She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and ada...
She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not...