It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness,
It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness,
To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction -- every kind of evidence in the logician's list -- have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.
He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears...
She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.
You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
He made close acquaintance with phenomena he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.
She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.
Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else.
You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her-doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.
So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
Always wanting another man than your own.
What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real.
How strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.
So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope....
Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds
But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!
Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.
That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
Misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror.
But no one came. Because no one ever does.
You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.
Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.
You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it.
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.
She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part-vistas of probable triumphs-the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won.
I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!
A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.
It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.
A man's body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained.
Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories