Misses Quotes (page 9)
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You must come to Lockleigh again," said Miss Molyneux, very sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel's friend. Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton—the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux and then she said: "I'm afraid I can never come again.
Henry James
We live in time-it holds us and moulds us-but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I am not referring to the theories of how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow...
Julian Barnes
How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?
Walker Percy
And what are you that, missing you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?
And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?
I know a man that’s a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?
Yet women’s ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell,—
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
How glorious to be introduced in a drawing room to a Lady who reads Novels, with "Mr. So-and-so - Miss So-and-so; Miss So-and-so, this is Mr So-and-so, who fell off a precipice and was half-drowned." Now I refer to you, whether I should lose so fine an opportunity of making my fortune. No romance lady could resist me - none.
John Keats
I always feel as if I'm struggling to become someone else. As if I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I suppose it's part of growing up, yet it's also an attempt to re-invent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself - as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I'm still...
Haruki Murakami
It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she was...She brought with her, two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.
Charles Dickens
R wrote Delahaye about all that had happened to him and about what he, R, wanted:
My friend,
You’re eating white flour and mud in your pigsty. I don’t miss Charleville. I don’t miss being a bored pig where the sun dries up all brains but sloth. Your brains or feelings’re being dried up: dead pig Delahaye.
Emotions are the movers of this world.
Me: I’m thirsty. What I’m thirsty for—whom I’m thirsty for—I can’t get so I drink poisons. I’ve got to free myself. From what? Pain? Oh—for more...
Kathy Acker
