How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothe...
It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from a...
This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.
It was a dark story.
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the...
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Going home must be like going to render an account.
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which,...
I -- I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that a...
The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day...
Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw...
Napoleon I., whose career had the quality of a duel against the wholeof Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a washbuckler, and had little res...
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved...
The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul.
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary mo...
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.