Hard Times

“ And at length this dark fanaticism, losing the support of his pride in the mere novelty of a reasoning so hard and dry, turned round upon him, as our fanaticism will, in black melancholy. The theoretic or imaginative desire to urge Time's creeping footsteps, was felt now as the physical fatigue which leaves the book or the letter unfinished, or finishes eagerly out of hand, for mere finishing's sake, unimportant business. ”

“ Let them remember that a time of distress is a time of dreadful temptation, and all the strength to resist is taken away; poverty presses, the soul is made desperate by distress, and what can be done? ”

“ It is an evil sign of the times,—of the times that are in so many respects hopeful,—that the greatest inventions of the day should always take the shape of engines of destruction! But what could I do in the agony of the moment? ”

“ To-day I find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seeking and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us—these buffet us for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did, why is this permitted? ”

“ People talk of our changing every seven years, but they make me feel as if I changed every seven minutes. What will you have, at any rate, and how can I help it? It's the grind of life, the wear and tear of time and misfortune. ”

“ His hard day's work in the keen air made him feel at once lazy and light of mood, and he had a confused sense of being in another world, where all was warmth and harmony and time could bring no change. ”

“ If the page blurs, as it may do if you were ever a child and if you have been tempered in the cruel furnace of the years, maybe the mists that fill the eyes will bathe the soul of you in their hallowed flood until the world-ache is soothed, and you can start up the big road again with some of the same wonderful exultation that sped you onward and forward in the Long Ago ... One touch of that, and the burden of Today, grown great in the years of struggle, slips from your shoulders as lightly as the wild-rose petal drops upon the bosom of the stream and floats away to the music of the riffles. ”

“ When we slowly recover from the tumult and passion of some violent distress, a peculiar stillness falls upon the Mind, and the atmosphere around it becomes in that stillness appallingly clear. We knew not, while wrestling with our woe, the extent of its ravages. ”

“ His usual habit was not to consider whether destiny were hard upon him or not—the shape of his ideals in cases of affliction being simply a moody "I am to suffer, I perceive." "This much scourging, then, it is for me." ”

“ Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising, staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples, drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before—nearer? Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. ”

“ The idea of the tale resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such unprecedented ease should have been felt by him as a crisis, and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could desire. ”

“ It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. ”

“ It's hard work—it's terrible hard. It's bad enough by itself, having to go out into the dark—and all alone; but it's full of worse terrors than even that. The air's full of them. When I am lyin' here still, with my eyes shut, prayin' for it all to be over, I seem to hear them buzzin' and whisperin' in the air. ”

“ Each trembled for himself, or for those dear to him; every countenance was stamped with an expression of feverish astonishment and dread. People walked with rapid steps, as if they would escape from the fate which threatened them; besides, they were in haste to return to their homes, for often they left life, health, happiness, and, two hours later, they found agony, death, and despair. ”

“ Ahead of her loomed, only dimly discerned as yet, the ordeal of strenuous monotony; the deadly-dull, prolonged grind wherein endurance, as it hardens, is subjected to a constantly harsher strain, until the soul revolts as, in the earlier stage, the body had rebelled. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ My first, my only, which for a warmblooded redhead is absurd, gentlemen, no argument. What happens? Why this other drift that for some of us, many of us, extends from months into years of accepting dullness and the erosion of daily demands, waiting for the rainbow blaze that may never appear, the heart knowing all the time that there's only one life and not much time to live it? ”

“ The first stage appears the most intolerable; but as they descend, like me, they sink so profoundly in the depths of wretchedness, that in their melancholy progress, those stages and degrees, which, at first, appeared as intolerable, lose all their terrors, in accumulated misery, and the desponding heart, when it takes a retrospective glance at past sufferings, often arraigns its want of patience and fortitude, for murmurings measured by present calamities. ”

“ The superficial reading or skimming, shifting of thought through the thousand objects which come before the mind gives the unrest and through it, the fatigue. Stop the unrest, and let rest abound. Rest comes through definite change of work. The man who leaves his office, rushes to mountain and farm, sees new scenes, faces, customs, eats new food, rides, fishes, swims, climbs and dances, is the one who comes back rested. There has been no unrest, but radical change. ”

“ It was an hour when the heart, surrounded by what can live no more and by what never before has lived, grows faint and sick with yearnings for its own past and forlorn with the inevitableness of change—the cruelty of all change. ”

“ For a brief season the order of life is changed, and the involuntary powers of the mind bear rule in place of the voluntary. The actual, with all its pains and pleasures, is for the time annihilated. The pressure of thought and the fever of emotion are both removed, and the over-taxed spirit is at rest. ”

“ Human life is brief and delay will be disastrous. Pathetic cry—a struggle against what in ordinary life is the inexorable. How many have gone the way whence they shall not return, unheard apparently, unvindicated, hidden in calumny and shame! And yet Job was right. ”

“ Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly. ”

“ She did not know, poor girl, in her ignorance, of the changes and chances that are continually going on in the world, where the greatest pleasures and the severest pains and trials last but for a season, and they are gone, and old Time keeps on the even tenor of his way, and pains and pleasures live only in the memory, and fade away as time rolls on, leaving, in the end, but a faint shadow of the past. ”

“ There is a time and a way in which they can be done: none shorter—none smoother. For all noble things, the time is long and the way rude. You may fret and fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall be so much attendant failure ”

“ We will stretch out our hands too late—when we have been caught in its fatal snares, and then in the darkness and misery that will surround us, we will feel how foolish we have been, and our cries of despair and distress will be echoed back to our own ears in sounds of mockery and scorn. ”

“ Our fathers had to make their way across many such places. We have been too ready to forget. Save for a few shocks, the years of our own lives have been spent in a sheltered age. But in the past, epochs of disturbance have been commoner than epochs of calm. ”

“ You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. ”

“ It is the same when, from the summit of an age, we gaze backward over the plain of time. The myriad of petty happenings are lost to sight, and we see only the striking events, the critical epochs, the mighty crises through which the world has passed. ”

“ The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame. ”

“ I’m sick of the tension, of wasting precious years in preparing and waiting. If the end of all our work is to be ‘mourning, poverty, and bitterness for years to come,’ if that’s what we are living for, I want an end of it. ”

“ Many is the hour when, after a hard day's work, or an exciting scene of peril or suffering, by the dim light of a tallow candle, or a lamp manufactured by my own hands, while others were lamenting their hard fate, or pouring out their indignation in unavailing grumblings, I have, while poring over a book, lost all sense of unhappiness, and been transported far away to other and happier scenes ”

“ When one has just passed through some terrible crisis wherein life and death have hung in the balance it is always astonishing to discover that those minutes so crowded with action were no longer than any others. ”

“ They have to be 254 filled with something. But there are times, I suppose, when lives lie fallow, the same as fields lie fallow, times when the days drag like harrow-teeth across the perplexed loam of our soul and nothing comes of it at all. ”

“ Others have borne the first fierce heat and burden of the day, but they will rush in young and untouched by calamity—bounding, shouting and singing. They will come armed with all that long-borne horrors and maddening human fatigue most need. ”

“ Days and weeks passed slowly on, with nothing to cheer us, but everything to depress our spirits. Cold, hungry, and discouraged with the sight of so much misery all about us, little wonder that some lost their reason. ”

“ There is the same grievous complaint against the time and its men and its spirit, something even of the same contemptuous despair, the same sense of the puniness of man in the centre of a cruel and frowning universe ”

“ At this melancholy season, reflection finds a passage to his heart, and he now revolves in his mind the folly and sinfulness of his past life;—considers within himself how idly he has wasted the substance he is at present in the utmost need of;—looks back with shame on the iniquity of his actions, and forward with horror on the rueful scene of misery that awaits him ”

“ In us was exemplified the old adage, "that man is but the creature of circumstances." Who could have foretold that in two short weeks we should think so differently, and yet in that fortnight of dark anxiety, undefined dread and forebodings, more distressing than reality itself, we had seemed to live years of misery. ”

“ Every chain must wear out in time. Mine was worn to attenuation before to-night—this last blow snaps it. To-morrow, when the world wakes to its petty round of cares and joys, my troubles will be over. ”

“ Summer is fiendish, and life is a curse, I said in my heart. What a great dull hard rock the world was! On it were a few barren narrow ledges, and on these, by exerting ourselves so that the force wears off our finger-nails, it allows us to hang for a year or two, and then hurls us off into outer darkness and oblivion, perhaps to endure worse torture than this. ”

“ And I realized suddenly, for the first time, the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of change. I understood that I could not resist, and what that meant.
Something was passing, a door was closing, and nothing in the world could hold it open. Hugo was helpless, and I was helpless; and every one. We could not stand still and we could not go back ”

“ To those among us, however, who have lived long enough to form some just estimate of the rate of the changes which are, hour by hour in accelerating catastrophe, manifesting themselves in the laws, the arts, and the creeds of men, it seems to me, that now at least, if never at any former time, the thoughts of the true nature of our life, and of its powers and responsibilities, should present themselves with absolute sadness and sternness. ”

“ Melancholy, I suppose, is the curse of the thinking classes; but I confess my soul wears a great uneasiness these days! The sudden and amazing turnover in human affairs, dramatic beyond anything in history, already seems to be taken as a matter of course. ”

“ There is no standard by which time can be measured, but the succession of our thoughts, and the changes that take place in the external world: from the latter I was totally excluded; the former made the lapse of some hours appear like the tediousness of weeks and months. At length a new sensation recalled my rambling meditations, and gave substance to my fears: I now felt the cravings of hunger, and perceived that, unless my deliverance were speedily effected, I must suffer a tedious and lingering death. ”