The Moon and Sixpence

by W. Somerset Maugham

Life is hard, and Nature takes sometimes a terrible delight in torturing her children.

You saw man in the nakedness of his primeval instincts, and you were afraid, for you saw yourself."

The colours were so strange that words can hardly tell what a troubling emotion they gave. They were sombre blues, opaque like a delicately carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre that suggested the palpitation of mysterious life; there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual passion that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the berries of holly—one thought of Christmas in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the pleasure of children—and yet by some magic softened till they had the swooning tenderness of a dove's breast; there were deep yellows that died with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook. Who can tell what anguished fancy made these fruits?

"The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small," he said, somewhat impressively.