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“No one can protect a soul against themselves—against their own hand, you know!”
Thomas Balfour’s heart was beating very fast. He was unused to the awful compression that comes after a lie, when it dawns upon the liar that the lie he has uttered is one to which he is now bound; that he must now keep lying, and compound smaller lies upon the first, and be shuttered in lonely contemplation of his own mistake.
nonchalance is a form of elegance, when it demands much, and declines to reveal its source.
“You can’t tell from looking at a man what he’s capable of doing. And you certainly can’t tell what he’s done.”
For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.
How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.
Loneliness cannot be reassured by proportion. Even friendship would have seemed to Pritchard a feast behind a pane of glass; even the smallest charity would have wet his lip, and left him wanting.
Gascoigne believed that justice ought to be a synonym for mercy, not an alternative. He also believed that merciful action answered to instinct before it answered to any law.
it is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive,
Moody paused a moment, thinking. “In a court of law,” he said at last, “a witness takes his oath to speak the truth: his own truth, that is. He agrees to two parameters. His testimony must be the whole truth, and his testimony must be nothing but the truth. Only the second of these parameters is a true limit. The first, of course, is largely a matter of discretion. When we say the whole truth we mean, more precisely, all the facts and impressions that are pertinent to the matter at hand. All that is impertinent is not only immaterial; it is, in many cases, deliberately misleading. Gentlemen,”
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Gascoigne could never stay vexed for long: even the shortest of intermissions was always sufficient to engender self-reproach.
Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.
But I judge it a very fine beginning, to make a practice of remembering those people we have loved. When we remember others fondly, we wish them health and happiness and all good things.
“Money is a burden,” said Ah Sook. This was a proverb he quoted often. “A burden that is felt most keenly by the poor,” said Ah Quee.
What had Balfour said, hours ago? “A string of coincidences is not a coincidence?” And what was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?
Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become willful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood—it acquires all the qualities of common superstition—and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence.
It was a hollow dividend that required no skill, no love, and no hours of patient industry: such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return.
The summation of Shepard’s character by the council at the Crown Hotel had been as critical as Lauderback’s had been sympathetic—which only showed, Moody thought, that a man ought never to trust another man’s evaluation of a third man’s disposition. For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance;
“But I confess you catch me off guard; I have not spent any time working on the definition, and should not like to hear it quoted back to me—at least not until I have spent some time thinking about how I might defend it.”
“Mr. Gascoigne says that you have come to Hokitika to make your fortune.” “Yes: so I hope.” “And how will you make it?” “By dint of hard work and good planning, I expect.” “Of course, there are many rich men who work little, and plan nothing at all.” “Those men are lucky,” Moody said. “Do you not wish to be lucky also?” “I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,” Moody said carefully. “Luck is by nature undeserved.”
A lucky man, I’ve always said, is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment. Luck only happens once and it’s always an accident when it does.
“We all want to be loved—and need to be loved, I think. Without love, we cannot be ourselves.”
“Some things are never done,” said the chaplain. “We do not forget those whom we have loved. We cannot forget them.”
“If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.”
Dawn is such a private hour, don’t you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.
Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.
True feeling is always circular—either circular, or paradoxical—simply because its cause and its expression are two halves of the very same thing! Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love—not truly.
