I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.
When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.
The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.
She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But the horses didn't want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices "No, not yet," and the sky said "No, not there.
Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra.
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand!
One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.
Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.
She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
It was unbearable, and he thought again, 'How unhappy I am!' and became happier.
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