“That place is too sweetly squalid for words. I love it; I revel in shaking off the trammels of respectability”
‘Miss Bartlett only sighed, and enveloped her in a protecting embrace as she wished her good-night. It gave Lucy the sensation of a fog’
‘The tramcar became entangled in their ranks, and moved on painfully, like a caterpillar in a swarm of ants. One of the little boys fell down, and some white bullocks came out of an archway. Indeed, if it had not been for the good advice of an old man who was selling button-hooks, the road might never have got clear. Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it….By the time Lucy was ready her cousin had done her breakfast, and was listening to the clever lady among the crumbs.’
‘The men on the river were fishing. (Untrue; but then, so is most information.)’
‘The hour was approaching at which the continental breakfast begins, or rather ceases, to tell, and the ladies bought some hot chestnut paste out of a little shop, because it looked so typical. It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown.’
‘She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date. There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful’
- “My father has that effect on nearly every one,” he informed her. “He will try to be kind.”
- “I hope we all try,” said she, smiling nervously.
- “Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.”
- “I only know what it is that’s wrong with him; not why it is.”
- “And what is it?” asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.
- “The old trouble; things won’t fit.”
- “What things?”
- “The things of the universe. It is quite true. They don’t.”
- “Oh, Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?”
“We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world sorrow.”
‘Suddenly she laughed; surely one ought to laugh. A young man melancholy because the universe wouldn’t fit, because life was a tangle or a wind, or a Yes, or something!’
‘It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano.’
‘She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation.’
‘disjoined from her music stool, was only a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face. She loved going to concerts, she loved stopping with her cousin, she loved iced coffee and meringues…“If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.” ‘
‘It was one of Mr. Beebe’s chief pleasures to provide people with happy memories.’
‘In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea.’
“The world,” she thought, “is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.”
‘She had complained of dullness, and lo! one man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms.’
‘This solitude oppressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.’
‘Of the many things Lucy was noticing to-day, not the least remarkable was this:the ghoulish fashion in which respectable people will nibble after blood’
‘She had read in it of the crocuses which had been bought for yellow and were coming up puce, of the new parlour-maid, who had watered the ferns with essence of lemonade, of the semi-detached cottages which were ruining Summer Street, and breaking the heart of Sir Harry Otway. She recalled the free, pleasant life of her home, where she was allowed to do everything, and where nothing ever happened to her. The road up through the pine-woods, the clean drawing-room, the view over the Sussex Weald—all hung before her bright and distinct, but pathetic as the pictures in a gallery to which, after much experience, a traveller returns.’
‘the glorious bewilderment of youth’
‘Pan had been amongst them—not the great god Pan, who has been buried these two thousand years, but the little god Pan, who presides over social contretemps and unsuccessful picnics.’
‘I think he was taken by surprise, just as I was before. But this time I’m not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. I had silly thoughts. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.” ‘
“At last,” thought she, “I shall understand myself. I shan’t again be troubled by things that come out of nothing, and mean I don’t know what.”
‘A tram roared by in the dark, and Lucy felt unaccountably sad, though she had long since dried her eyes. She lifted them to the ceiling, where the griffins and bassoons were colourless and vague, the very ghosts of joy.”It has been raining for nearly four hours,” she said at last.’
Lucy cried aloud: “It isn’t true. It can’t all be true. I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly.”
-
liesllapin liked this
-
l-x liked this
-
breathingvioletfog liked this
-
ashipwreck liked this
-
idio-syncratic liked this
-
tipsofspires liked this
-
booradleyy liked this
-
youreacunt liked this
-
duskby liked this
-
sore-thumbelina posted this
