Various authors

“ It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets with blacks—symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of life. ”

“ A blast that caught the little lamp full in its foul, yellow flame-tongue, left Wladislaw in the dark. He felt about for matches; perhaps no act could have so certainly restored him to this world, from which his thoughts had wandered. He found none anywhere. His straying hand came upon the garment; he caught it up and slipped it over his head, half horrified to feel that it came below his collar-bone in the neck, and left his arms with only half-a-dozen inches of sleeve.
Matches were lurking in his trousers pocket, and he had the sulphury splutter going in a moment and the lamp re-lit. ”

“ He shuddered as he gazed, and found two strenuous eyes peering into his out of this monstrous visage.
"Such as my poor Dunbeekin is, my lord," he said, wonderingly, "it puts itself with pride under your feet."
"Its name shall be exalted above all others," said the Bishop. The voice came steady and clear-toned, as if informed by a spirit which carnal decay could not shake. "It is privileged to hold for a night the most priceless and inestimable of earth's treasures—the piece of the True Cross which I bear in my unworthy hands." He pushed the casket forward into the moonlight. ”

“ Hence it comes about, that when we are set down for a brief Sunday, far from the central roar, our first sensation is that of a stillness corporeal, positive, aggressive. The clamorous ocean of sound has ebbed to an infinite distance; in its place this other sea of fullest silence conies crawling up, whelming and flooding us, its crystalline waves lapping us round with a possessing encirclement as distinct as that of the other angry tide now passed away and done with. The very Spirit of Silence is sitting hand in hand with us, and her touch is a real warm thing. ”

“ If I but raise my hand, all the riches of the world fall to me. Tis not what I wish for."
Into her eyes came such a glitter as the moon makes on the moist skin of a sleeping snake. The firmness of her lips relaxed; they grew child-like in their softness. The atmosphere became almost tangible: I could scarce breathe.
"What is it? All that I can do, if it be no sin."
"Come with me to my loom," she said, "and if you do the thing I desire you shall see him. There is no evil in't—in past times kings have sighed for the same." ”

“ Strange to think that a little silver coin of no possible use or beauty in itself can be exchanged for so much tangible beautiful pleasure. A piece of money is like a piece of opium, for in it lie locked up the most wonderful dreams—if you have only the brains and hearts to dream them.
When at last the little feast grew near its end, Love and Beauty would smoke their cigarettes together; and it was a favourite trick of theirs to lower the lamp a moment, so that they might see the stars rush down upon them through the skylight which hung above their table. ”

“ Dreamthorp a castle, a chapel, a lake, a straggling strip of grey houses, with a blue film of smoke over all—lies embosomed in emerald. Summer with its daisies runs up to every cottage door. From the little height where I am now sitting I see it beneath me. Nothing could be more peaceful. The wind and the birds fly over it. A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a white gable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed apple-tree beyond, and disappears. I see figures in the street, but hear them not. The hands on the church clock seem always pointing to one hour. ”

“ If she likes you, if you amuse her, and if you never remotely oppose or question her desire of the moment, she can be all that is most gracious, most reasonable, most captivating: an inspiring listener, an entertaining talker: mingling the naïvete, the experience of evil, the half comical, half appealing unsophistication, of a girl, of a child almost—of one who has always lived far aloof from the struggle and uncleanness of the workaday world—with the wit, the humour, the swift appreciation and responsiveness of an exceedingly impressionable, clear-sighted, and accomplished woman. ”

“ She wanted . . . . she wanted the living, not the dead. It was the living man who, though so rarely seen, had filled the dreary emptiness of her life. She wanted the man, not the clay. Dazed, unstrung, and with the odd sensation of a hand clutching at her heart, she dropped into one of the cretonne-covered chairs beside the bed, and, as she did so, became conscious that her arm touched something warm.
It was a well-worn dressing-gown which had been thrown over the chair-back, the sleeve still bulging and round with the form of the man who had worn it that very day. ”

“ Passion
By Richard Garnett, LL.D., C.B.
This flame of Passion that so high in air,
⁠By spice and balsam of the spirit fed,
⁠With fire and fume vast Heaven hath overspread,
And blots the stars with smoke, or dims with glare:
Soon shall it droop, and radiance pure and fair
⁠Again from azure altitudes be shed;
⁠And we the murky grime and embers red
Shall sift, if haply dust of Love be there. ”

“ At last the little feast is quite, quite finished. Beauty has gone home; her lover still carries her face in his heart as she waved and waved and waved to him from the rattling lighted tramcar; long he sits and sits thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy—Beata Beatrix—above the music. ”

“ Hawkers in a neighbouring alley were calling, and the monotonous ting-ting of the muffin-bell made an audible background to the picture. I left it, and then the glamour was already passing. In a little while darkness possessing it, the place would reassume its aspect of sordid gloom.
There is a street not far from there, bearing a name that quickens life within one, by the vision it summons of a most peaceful country, where the broad roads are but pathways through green meadows, and your footstep keeps the time to a gentle music of pure streams. ”

“ As when in parts of Byron a theatrical bent in his nature, joined with a mode of his time, gives you expressions that on first appearance are not real, not sincere, you may prove a fine taste by your dislike, but you prove a narrow range of feeling and a poor imagination if you get beyond it; so I venture to think in this matter of Ouida's guardsman and her wicked women, the magnificence, the high key, the glaring colours may offend or amuse you, but they should not render you blind to the humanity that is below the first appearance. ”

“ Yet the Captain was rarely unhappy, for he alone conned the pages of the magic book, ever present to him, a growing marvel, in manhood as in childhood. When the girl of his early love, weary of waiting for the home that was to harbour her, distrustful of promises as lightly made as broken, turned from a world of vanities and unsatisfied yearnings to take the veil as a Sister of Mercy, it was a keen wound, soon to be treasured as a melancholy sweet episode in the romance of the book. ”

“ I recognised fully now the cause of the agitation she had produced in me from the first—the faint foreknowledge that there was something very stiff I should have to do for her. I felt more than ever committed to my fate as, standing before her in the big drawing-room where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to string together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she successively tossed me. Pale and bright, in her monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty ”

“ Many a time has Rejane appeared in cap, cotton frock, and white apron; many a time in robes of state, glittering with diamonds; she has worn the buskin or the sock, demeaned herself like a gutter heroine, or dropped the stately curtsey of the high-born lady. But never, except in Madame Sans-Gêne, has she been able to bring all her roles into one focus, exhibit her whole wardrobe, and yet remain one and the same person, compress into one evening the whole of her life. ”

“ There is no division into impersonal judgment and private sentiment. The only criticism that has value is private, personal, intimate.
Less special to Stendhal now, though rare at the time in which he lived, is the appeal to life as the basis of art. "To find the Greeks, look in the forests of America." Go to the swimming-school or the ballet to realise the correctness and the energy of Michelangelo. Familiarity is everything. "The work of genius is the sense of conversation," and as "the man who takes the word of another is a cruel bore in a salon," so is he as a critic. ”

“ Her book of life is Paris; she knows her Paris by heart; and whoso knows Paris can dispense with further knowledge. She adores originality and novelty, but she can herself transmute the commonplace into the original, the old into the new. Whatever she touches forthwith reflects her own animation, her mobility, her elusive charm. Flowers have no loveliness until she has grouped them; colours are colourless unless they suit her complexion. ”

“ Astonished at her coldness, Voltaire said: "But, mademoiselle, if you yourself had a lover who abandoned you, what would you do?" "I would take another," she answered. That, Stendhal adds, is the correct point of view for nineteen-twentieths of life, but not for art. "I care only for genius, for young painters with fire in the soul and open intelligence." For disinterested, cool taste, for objective justness and precision, he has only contempt. Indeed, he accepts Goethe's definition of taste as the art of properly tying one's cravats in things of the mind. ”

“ Then the old utter dejection came over her as she thought of her life; if no one should love her, and she should grow old and fixed in desolation? This was no sorrow at an unfortunate circumstance, but a dejection so far-reaching that its existence seemed to her more real than her own; it must have existed in the world before she was born, it must have been since the beginning. The smaller clouds which had darkened her day were forced aside, and the whole heaven was black with this great hopelessness. ”

“ It was in this quarter for a brief sweet time that Love and Beauty made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to nest in the masthead of a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this quarter, as alas, Love and Beauty must choose so many things—for its cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him. ”

“ When by the tempest are scattered magnificent ashes of Autumn;
When, upon orchard and lane, breaks the white foam of the Spring:
When, in extravagant revel, the Dawn, a bacchante upleaping,
Spills, on the tresses of Night, vintages golden and red;
When, as a token at parting, munificent Day, for remembrance,
Gives, unto men that forget, Ophirs of fabulous ore;
When, invincibly rushing, in luminous palpitant deluge,
Hot from the summits of Life, poured is the lava of noon ”

“ It was Virtue's very splendid Dance of Death.
A sickening confusion of odours assailed my senses; each essence a vile enticement, outraging Nature by a perversion of her own pure spell.
A timidly protesting fragrance stole strangely by. I started at its approach. It summoned a stinging memory. I stepped forward to escape it, but stopped, confronted by the being who had shared, by the flickering lamp-light and in the presence of that silent witness, the poor little violet's prayer. ”

“ I am not one to crawl into Heaven that way. I will be borne across my diocese with pomp, and the clashing of spears and shields about me; and I will be entering Rosscarbery with my bells tolling and my priests chanting as they walk two by two, and all the people wailing at the sides of the path—and kneeling, mind you, as I pass on my way, with this great relic still in my hands. ”

“ The spectre has the most cunning disguises, and often when near us, we are unaware of the fact of proximity. Unsuspected, this idea of death lurks in the sweetness of music; it has something to do with the pleasure with which we behold the vapour of morning; it comes between the passionate lips of lovers; it lives in the thrill of kisses. 'An inch deeper, and you will find the emperor.' Probe joy to its last fibre and you will find death. ”

“ I daresay I should have got on with her better if she had had a ray of imagination—if it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to regard Saltram's manifestations in any other manner than as separate subjects of woe. They were all flowers of his nature, pearls strung on an endless thread; but she had a stubborn little way of challenging them one after the other, as if she never suspected that he had a nature, such as it was, or that deficiencies might be organic; the irritating effect of a mind incapable of a generalisation. ”

“ Shergold had not believed in soul or immortality. He had believed that with death the life of a man comes to an end, just as does the life of a mouse. Le Mesurier had often listened, perforce, to his dogmatising on such views to Lily; to his proclaiming that each individual life is but a flash of light between two eternities of darkness; that just as the body returns to the elements from which it came, so the spirit is reabsorbed into the forces and energies which move the world. And because Shergold had no belief in another life, he had set an immense value upon this one. ”

“ Every time she handed Gretchen a letter from her lover, it was with a more reluctant action, a more wistful and appealing look.
She saw, but would not heed. Cecily had decided—the act was hers—let her abide by it!
In the meantime, every week she could write, with white lips and shaking hand, "I love you, Noel." Had not Cecily herself wished it?
"Madness! Of course, I know that," she thought; "but if I like to be mad just once before I go away to live out my dull, highly respectable life, who is there to hinder me? It's an inexpensive luxury. ”