Great English Short Stories Quotes

“Since then Bertha and I have lived apart,—she in her own neighbourhood, the mistress of half our wealth; I as a wanderer in foreign countries,”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless, despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places are surrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even Meunier looked paralysed; life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him. As for me, this scene seemed of one texture with the rest of my existence: horror was my familiar,”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“The dead woman’s eyes were wide open, and met hers in full recognition, —the recognition of hate. With a sudden strong effort, the hand that Bertha had thought forever still was pointed towards her, and the haggard face moved. The gasping eager voice said,— “You mean to poison your husband”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“felt that Bertha had been watching for the moment of death as the sealing of her secret: I thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“saying. I remember well the look and the smile with which she one day said, after a mistake of this kind on my part: “I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was the reason why you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you have become rather duller than the rest of the world.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable—the unloving and the unloved—there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death,—the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“there were no audible quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay within the silence of our own hearts;”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha’s inward self remained shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the language of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of wondering whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her smile. But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner towards me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and chilling me”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“When people are well known to each other, they talk rather of what befalls them externally, leaving their feelings and sentiments to be inferred.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“My softened feeling towards my father made this the happiest time I had known since childhood; —these last months in which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha, of longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“I should have been stung by the perception that my father transferred the inheritance of an eldest son to me with a mortified sense that fate had compelled him to the unwelcome course of caring for me as an important being. It was only in spite of himself that he began to think of me with anxious regard. There is hardly any neglected child for whom death has made vacant a more favoured place, who will not understand what I mean.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“now, at last, a sorrow had come,—the sorrow of old age, which suffers the more from the crushing of its pride and its hopes, in proportion as the pride and hope are narrow and prosaic. His son was to have been married soon,—would probably have stood for the borough at the next election. That son’s existence was the best motive that could be alleged for making new purchases of land every year to round off the estate. It is a dreary thing to live on doing the same things year after year, without knowing why we do them. Perhaps the tragedy of disappointed youth and passion is less piteous than the tragedy of disappointed age and worldliness.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“I will not dwell on the scene I found there. My brother was dead,—had been pitched from his horse, and killed on the spot by a concussion of the brain.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married? I wouldn’t mind if you really loved me only for a little while.” Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started away from me, recalled me to a sense of my strange, my criminal indiscretion.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“the groom brought up my brother’s horse which was to carry him to the hunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door, florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent, feeling what a good-natured fellow he was not to behave insolently to us all on the strength of his great advantages.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“I knew my father’s thought about me: “That lad will never be good for anything in life: he may waste his years in an insignificant way on the income that falls to him: I shall not trouble myself about a career for him.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place early in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife,”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“girl Bertha, whose words and looks I watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood continually that Bertha with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the more rigid mouth,—with the barren selfish soul laid bare; no longer a fascinating secret, but a measured fact, urging itself perpetually on my unwilling sight. Are you unable to give me your sympathy—you who read this? Are you unable to imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a common hue?”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“She came with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes. I shuddered,—I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts; but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each other.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was not aware of”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“There must always have been an antipathy between our natures. As it was, he became in a few weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on edge. My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions than with those of any other person who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant’s passion for him, with his half-pitying contempt for me—”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“the bond was not an intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from community of feeling. Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese gamins, and not acceptable in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was, though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic resentment, I made timid advances towards him.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent’s duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Latimer, old boy,” he said to me in a tone of compassionate cordiality, “what a pity it is you don’t have a run with the hounds now and then! The finest thing in the world for low spirits!” “Low spirits!” I thought bitterly, as he rode away; “that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dulness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit,—these are the keys to happiness.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“The most prosaic woman likes to believe herself the object of a violent, a poetic passion; and without a grain of romance in her, Bertha had that spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to the idea that the brother of the man she meant to marry was dying with love and jealousy for her sake.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven,—”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“IT WAS late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence;”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories