How Quotes (page 329)
You know what I am?" he says."What?"I'm an ordinary person."Come on."I know. Who isn't an ordinary person? How horribly presumptuous to want to be anything else. But I have to tell you. I've been treated as something special for so long and I've tried my hardest to be something special but I'm not, I'm not exceptional, I'm smart enough, but I'm not brilliant and I'm not spiritual or even all that focused. I think I can stand that, but I'm not sure if the people around me can.
Michael Cunningham
If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is now expedient to give some description of Mrs. Allen, that the reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work, and how she will, probably, contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is capable -- whether by her imprudence, vulgarity, or jealousy -- whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character, or turning her out of doors.
Jane Austen
kneel down, kneel down- kneel round her every one of you, and mark my words. I say she starved to death. I never knew how bad she was, till the fever came upon her, and then her bones were starting through the skin. There was neither fire nor candle; she died in the dark- in the dark. She couldn't even see her children's faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged for her in the streets, and they sent me to prison. When I came back, she was dying; and all the blood in my...
Charles Dickens
a connotation of infinity
sharpens the temporal splendor of this night
when souls which have forgot frivolity
in lowliness, noting the fatal flight
of worlds whereto this earth’s a hurled dream
down eager avenues of lifelessness
consider for how much themselves shall gleam,
in the poised radiance of perpetualness.
When what’s in velvet beyond doomed thought
is like a woman amorous to be known;
and man, whose here is alway worse than naught,
feels the tremendous yonder for his own—
on...
E. E. Cummings