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Mrs Gould cautioned me against Mrs Cholmondeley. I insinuated that if she was a woman of intrigue, why not have that amusement with her? She did not answer that, but said she had the character of a jilt, that she had given encouragement to a certain lord, got many presents from him, at last consented to an assignation, and when he attempted to use freedoms, her husband came in.

In reality, a person of small fortune who has only the common views of life and would just be as well as anybody else, cannot like London. But a person of imagination and feeling, such as the Spectator finely describes, can have the most lively enjoyment from the sight of external objects without regard to property at all.

After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into a bulletin-board, and read off “notices” of meetings and societies and things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of doom—a queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities, away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it

China is a black hole. I want to dive into it. I don't know where I am going. I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead. I want to think on my feet, live on the run. Never again can I endure to spend my life in one room.

And in that one half-hour, I understood with the utmost clarity that from now on, my existence could no longer one protracted apology for my father's unknown missteps, and that I myself was no longer content to serve as a voluntary cog in a disjointed mechanism by day, and dream the unearthly dreams of others by night ....

Then he nodded and began to climb the stairs. On the third landing, he heard a plate smashing onto the floor in the apartment belonging to the mysterious woman with Nefertiti's profile. As he continued to ascend, he thought that an altogether unusual amount of porcelain was being broken nowadays in building number seven, Belinsky Street, in the city of Moscow.

Someone else who was killed in Capri, when picnickers dropped a canned ham from a high cliff to the beach below, rather than carrying the thing down a switchback trail.

Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.

Things I doubt ever got shouted: "He that would sup of the crab of Witchland must deal with the nippers ere he essay the shell"

He was robed in a long mantle of scarlet lined with ermine, with crabs, woodlice, and centipedes worked thereon in golden thread. His head was covered with a black velvet cap with a peacock's feather fastened with a brooch of silver. Supported by his trainbearers and attendants, and leaning on his golden staff, he with raucous accent delivered his mission:

Everyone damns the city, but sooner or later they come anyhow. In the dying light Five Dragons sees the legendary city smoke rising into the air, confirming his image of what a city is: one gigantic smokestack....

My only companions had been unamiable children, and ignorant, wrong-headed girls; from whose fatiguing folly, unbroken solitude was often a relief most earnestly desired and dearly prized. But to be restricted to such associates was a serious evil, both in its immediate effects and the consequences that were likely to ensue.

She had no knowledge of good. She had no heart and no sense of the good thing, the right thing, and she had no field on which to wage the battle that was, in fact, raging in her.

The calling of the Estates-General assumed in the eyes of the people a hope both radiant and nebulous, a hope for a national regeneration, a new era in which men would be more happy. It is in this aspect that the Revolution, at its beginning, can be compared to many religious movements in their early stages, in which poor men joyously see a return to the earthly paradise.

La Fayette enjoyed an incomparable prestige for about a year after the fall of the Bastille. As the "Hero of Two Worlds" he has remained the incarnation of the bourgeois revolution. His sincerity, disinterestedness and generosity surrounded him with a halo, but he was more a man of romantic illusions and somewhat juvenile vanity than of political skill or realistic sense. He was more a symbol than a leader.

This was a world where one became outdated before one's time was up. An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly any more. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity.

It is unusual to have all one's experience under one roof. And I have really had none outside it. I cannot imagine anything happening to me anywhere else, or anything happening to me at all. I do not much like like things to happen, or I should not much like it. I am content to live in other people's lives, content not to live at all. Whatever it is, I am content.

D' y' ebber yeh w'at de cya'ge-hoss say w'en 'e see de cyaht-hoss tu'n loose in de sem pawstu'e wid he, an' knowed dat some'ow de cyaht gotteh be haul'? W'y 'e jiz snawt an' kick up 'is heel'"--she suited the action to the word--"an' tah' roun' de fiel' an' prance up to de fence an' say: 'Whoopy! shoo! shoo! dis yeh country gittin' too free!

But there is a slavery that no legislation can abolish,--the slavery of caste. That, like all the slaveries on earth, is a double bondage. And what a bondage it is which compels a community, in order to preserve its established tyrannies, to walk behind the rest of the intelligent world!

H-my young friend, when we say, 'we people,' we always mean we white people. The non-mention of color always implies pure white; and whatever is not pure white is to all intents and purposes pure black. When I say the 'whole community,' I mean the whole white portion; when I speak of the 'undivided public sentiment,' I mean the sentiment of the white population. What else could I mean?

Profligates who are virtuous in their principles. True. But practically and for the moment I prefer a rake who kills no one to a puritan who kills everyone. And the thing that above all I have never been able to accept is a rake who wants to kill everyone. (Trump?)

What better can a man wish for than poverty? I didn't say destitution nor yet the hopeless labor of the modern proletariat. But I don't see what anyone can want more than poverty with the possibility of activity in leisure.

Once engaged in Stalin's State Security, the only real alternatives were obedience or suicide.

The act of watching television for protracted periods (and there's no way to insure the narcotic effects won't take you over) is deleterious to the human animal. The medium itself insists you sit there quietly and cease thinking.