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Her hand became a closer prisoner.

All at once an alarming delicious shudder went through her frame. From him to her it coursed, and back from her to him. Forward and back love's electric messenger rushed from heart to heart, knocking at each, till it surged tumultuously against the bars of its prison, crying out for its mate. They stood trembling in unison, a lovely couple under these fair heavens of the morning.

“Oh!" said Lady Blandish to Sir Austin, "if men could give their hands to women unsoiled—how different would many a marriage be! She will be a happy girl who calls Richard husband."

"Happy, indeed!" was the baronet's caustic ejaculation. "But where shall I meet one equal to him, and his match?"

"I was innocent when I was a girl," said the lady.

Sir Austin bowed a reserved opinion.

Tom Bakewell, now the youth's groom, had to give the baronet a report of his young master's proceedings, in common with Adrian, and while there was no harm to tell, Tom spoke out. "He do ride like fire every day to Pig's Snout," naming the highest hill in the neighbourhood, "and stand there and stare, never movin', like a mad 'un. And then hoam agin all slack as if he'd been beaten in a race by somebody.”

“Surely," said Lady Blandish, "you knew he scribbled?"

"A very different thing from writing poetry," said the baronet. "No Feverel has ever written poetry."

"I don't think it's a sign of degeneracy," the lady remarked. "He rhymes very prettily to me."

A London phrenologist, and a friendly Oxford Professor of poetry, quieted Sir Austin's fears.

Lady Blandish honestly loved the boy. She would tell him: ”If I had been a girl, I would have had you for my husband." And he with the frankness of his years would reply: ”And how do you know I would have had you?" causing her to laugh and call him a silly boy, for had he not heard her say she would have had him? Terrible words, he knew not then the meaning of!

“In Sir Austin's Note-book was written: ”Between Simple Boyhood and Adolescence—The Blossoming Season—on the threshold of Puberty, there is one Unselfish Hour—say, Spiritual Seed-time."
He took care that good seed should be planted in Richard, and that the most fruitful seed for a youth, namely, Example, should be of a kind to germinate in him the love of every form of nobleness.”

Bach lay there for a while with his eyes closed. He began counting sheep -- one white, one black, one white, one black, one white, one black...
The next morning, after breakfast, he wrote a letter to his mother. Knowing she wouldn't like what he was writing, he frowned and sighed. But it was important to tell her what he now come to feel. He hadn't said anything during his last spell of leave.

As Novikov said goodbye, he began to realize that she wasn’t really so very strong, that a woman was still a woman— for all the sharpness and clarity of her mind.

‘There’s so much I wanted to say and I haven’t said any of it’, she said.

But that wasn’t quite so. What really matters, whatever it is that decides people’s fates, had become clearer. He loved her.

“Boys are like monkeys," remarked Adrian, at the close of his explosions, "the gravest actors of farcical nonsense that the world possesses. May I never be where there are no boys! A couple of boys left to themselves will furnish richer fun than any troop of trained comedians. No: no Art arrives at the artlessness of nature in matters of comedy. You can't simulate the ape.

Father and son stood there in silence, side by side. Then the father glanced up at his son and spread his hands helplessly as though to say: ‘May I be pardoned by both the living and the dead. I failed to save the people I loved.’
That night his father told his story. He spoke calmly and quietly. What he described could only by spoken about quietly; it could never be conveyed by tears or screams.

A monomaniac at large, watching over sane people in slumber! thinks Adrian Harley, as he hears Sir Austin's footfall, and truly that was a strange object to see.—Where is the fortress that has not one weak gate? where the man who is sound at each particular angle? Ay, meditates the recumbent cynic, more or less mad is not every mother's son?

Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes, not written or formally taught, but intuitively understood by all, and invariably acted upon by the loyal and the true. The race is not nearly civilized, we must remember. Thus, not to follow your leader whithersoever he may think proper to lead; to back out of an expedition because the end of it frowns dubious, and the present fruit of it is discomfort;

A pilgrim walks away in the mist:
It’s you who comes into my mind.
On a fume-filled street a car drives past:
It’s you who comes into my mind.
I see the lamps come on at six,
But have only you in my mind.
I travel west— your image picks
Its endless way through my mind.

He thought remorsefully that this kind of affair always came to a bad end. He remembered something he had read,either in Kuprin or in some foreign novel, about love being like a lump of coal: hot, it burns you; cold, it makes you dirty.He wanted to cry, or rather to have a good moan, to find someone he could tell his troubles to. It wasn't his own choice,it was the will of Fate. This one the only kind of love he knew

No one else understood how appalled her husband had been by the savagery of general collectivization and the events of 1937. She alone understood his spiritual purity. But then she alone knew how servile he was in the face of power.
That was why he was so capricious at home, such a petty tyrant. That was why Masha had to clean his shoes for him, why she had to fan him in hot weather with her headscarf,

Past sorrow is to me like wine,
Stronger with every passing year.

An explosion close by raised a cloud of dust.It was like something from fairy-tale; the armed men,sitting on blood-colored bricks and surrounded by this red mist, seemed to have sprung from the day of judgment recorded in the Lay of Igor’s Campaign.
Suddenly Katya’s heart stirred in an absurd expectation of future happiness

I am from the tribe of Asra: when we love, we die in silence.

Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his garden, certainly: an epicurean of our modern notions. To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character, was the wise youth's problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession…

Then Guryev held forth about how badly the war was reported in the newspapers.

'Those sons of bitches never see any action themselves. They just sit on the other side of the Volga and write their articles. If someone gives them a good dinner, then they write about him. They're certainly no Tolstoys. People have been reading War and Peace for a century and they'll go on reading it for another century.'

What saves people when their bovine melancholy, their mute fatalism yields to a piercing sense of horror— what saves people then is the opium of optimism.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every way.

The most fundamental change in people at this time [autumn 1942] was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.
'Who am I? In the end, who am I?' Sofya Osipovna wondered. 'The short, snotty little girl afraid of her father and grandmother? The stout, hot-tempered woman with tabs of rank on her collar? Or this mangy, lice-ridden creature?'

”I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.”

“Our new thoughts have thrilled dead bosoms," he wrote;by which avowal it may be seen that youth had manifestly gone from him,since he had ceased to be jealous of the ancients.There was a half-sigh floating through his pages for those days of intellectual coxcombry,when ideas come to us affecting the embraces of virgins,& swear to us they are ours alone,& no one else have they ever visited: and we believe them.

Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves

As she looked at them she thought: 'How can one ever understand oneself? Why does the past make me so sad? Why do I feel so sorry for Krymov? Why can't I stop thinking about him?

[...]

Then she had the idea that she must be worrying so much about Krymov only because she was longing for someone else-- a man she hardly ever seemed to think about.
'Do I really love him?' she wondered, surprised.

He told Yevgenia about a remark made to him 44 years before by the provincial marshal of the nobility:
"You, a descendant of one of the oldest families of Russia, have set out to prove to the peasants that you are descended from a monkey. The peasants will just ask: "What about the Grand Dukes? The Tsarevich? The Tsaritsa? What about the Tsar himself...?"

Viktor’s wife turned her thin, cold face towards him. It had grown younger from suffering. She looked at him fixedly, entreatingly.
Once they had had a young cat. As she was giving birth to her first litter, there had been one kitten she hadn’t been able to get out. As she was dying, she had crawled up to Viktor and cried, staring at him with wide, bright eyes.

How can I finish this letter? Where can I find the strength, my son? Are there words capable of expressing my love for you? I kiss you, your eyes, your forehead, your hair.
Remember that your mother’s love is always with you, in grief and in happiness, no one has the strength to destroy it.
Vityenka…This is the last line of your mother’s last letter to you. Live, live, live for ever…Mama.

I visit the sick in their homes.Dozens of people are crowded into minute little rooms— half-blind old men,unweaned babies,pregnant women.I’m used to looking into people’s eyes for symptoms of diseases— glaucoma, cataract.Now I can no longer look at people’s eyes like that;what I see now is the reflection of the soul. A good soul, a sad, good-natured soul, defeated by violence but triumphant over violence