Put into words by this selfish, well-fed, and supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.
No doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.
Individual destiny is to a large extent defined, and human potential frequently circumscribed, by social conventions as ephemeral as they are ‘‘inscrutable.
He had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the real one in the summer-house. The longing wa...
Declivity.
[Selden] had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to g...
You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence?
You don’t know how much I need such a friend, she said. My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them wou...
What more she said, or what de Crucis answered, he could never afterward recall. He had a confused sense of having cried out a last unavailing protest, faintly, inarticulately, like a man struggling t...
Well—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.
Toward Florence he was specially drawn by the fact that Alfieri now lived there; but, as often happens after such separations, the reunion was a disappointment. Alfieri, indeed, warmly welcomed his fr...
Todos vivían en una especie de mundo de acertijos, donde lo verdadero nunca se decía ni se hacía ni se pensaba.
To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that's what I call success.
Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity....
Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: 'Love, why...
The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in bo...
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
The whole question hinged on Arthur's statement to his brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child d...
The tragedy of the woman's death, and of his own share in it, were as nothing in the disaster of his bright irreclaimableness.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.