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She often used to think of the strangeness of very early life; one came, it seemed, from a dark cloud, there was a glow of light, but for a moment, and afterwards the night. It was as if one gazed at a velvet curtain, heavy, mysterious, impenetrable blackness, and then, for the twinkling of an eye, one spied through a pinhole a storied town that flamed, with fire about its walls and pinnacles.

I will not weary you with the history of the next year, for the adventures of a man who sinks are too trite to be worth recalling. My money did not last me long; I found that I must be neatly dressed, or no one to whom I applied would so much as listen to me....

Everyone who saw her at the police court said she was at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on. I have spoken to a man who saw her, and I assure you he positively shuddered as he tried to describe the woman, but he couldn't tell why.

Athos: Time, my dear, time will afford the opportunity, time is man's martingale, the more binding it is, the more you gain when you know how to wait.

I could not be sure—so much more presence of mind and histrionic resource have women than fall to the lot of our clumsy sex—whether the return of the Count was not, in truth, a surprise to her....

For that morning Mr Justice Harbottle had been found hanging by the neck from the banister at the top of the great staircase, and quite dead.

Nice things aggravated her spirits and made her fretful. She liked the tea to be stringy and bitter, and she liked the bread to be stale;—as she preferred also that her [widow's] weeds should be battered and old. She was approaching that stage at which ashes become pleasant eating, and sackcloth is grateful to the skin.

I hurried away convinced in my own mind that if he unearthed there the clue he wanted, it would lead him to the other Perigord, where Caesar Brisson had much good wine in his big vaults alongside the quay.

And far away beyond that heavy line of smoke, on the horizon of the crystalline sea, dreamlike in the faintness and delicacy of its outlines, one saw the French coast. On either side of me all the quaint old houses of the terraced town seemed to be rising one above another in a wild endeavour to miss nothing of the spectacle.

A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house. It is too heavy to transport so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive. They hack through the white flesh—the poor creature looking ever more pained, more aristocratic, more puzzled as its legs are hacked off.

Oh, my God! when the justice of Heaven permits the Evil one to carry out a scheme of vengeance—when its execution is committed to the lost and terrible victim of sin, who owes his own ruin to the man, the very man, whom he is commissioned to pursue—then, indeed, the torments and terrors of hell are anticipated on earth.

I began indeed to see that the cruelty so much talked of, used in Virginia and Barbados, and other colonies, in whipping the negro slaves, was not so much owing to the tyranny and passion and cruelty of the English, as had been reported, the English not being accounted to be of a cruel disposition, and really are not so; but that it is owing to the brutality and obstinate temper of the negroes.

I was provoked at having this boy called captain, and I cried, and told my nurse I would be called captain; for she told me I was a gentleman, and I would be a captain, that I would. The good woman, to keep the peace, told me, ay, ay, I was a gentleman, and therefore I should be above a captain, for I should be a colonel, and that was a great deal better than a captain; “for, my dear,” says she, “every tarpauling, if

I am sorry to say that today is worse than ever before. I have got used to the lack of water. I have got used to the lack of power. But the thing that makes today so bad is the lack of the rule of law.

It s the story of a process of a poison, a poison which excites the reciprocal action os spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior. Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.

I do not know how many props support the world, but three of them at least are obtuseness, ignorance, and stupidity.

Sometimes, when it had been a hard day at school and the future looked unusually dark, Miss Matt would permit herself to cry luxuriously for half an our; afterward she would wash her face, and dress and go out to some nice restaurant for dinner.

Nothing is hard to do unless you get upset or excited about it.

What most people call power Buddhists call cravings. The five cravings are for wealth, fame, sex, fancy food, and lots of sleep.

Sartre, if we can judge by the vivid descriptions in his books, found sex a nightmarish process of struggling not to drown in slime and gloop.

Heisenberg: The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them is impossible.

He liked history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey.