“They used to say of me that I'd as many lucky escapes as Harry Smith!'
'Shouldn't be at all surprised: I've seen one of 'em myself,' Brough said cryptically.”
“Yet, after all, Jenny thought she had been granted more than she hoped for when she married him. He did love her: differently, but perhaps more enduringly; and he had grown to depend on her. She thought that they would have many years of quiet content: never reaching the heights, but living together in comfort and deepening friendship.”
“But it was only in epic tragedies that gloom was unrelieved. In real life tragedy and comedy were so intermingled that when one was most wretched ridiculous things happened to make one laugh in spite of oneself”
“After all, life was not made up of moments of exaltation, but of quite ordinary, everyday things”
“He took her face between his hands, turning it up, and looking down at her for a moment before he kissed her. "I do love you, Jenny," he said gently. "Very much indeed-- you are part of my life. Julia was never that-only a boy's impractical dream.”
“Julia stood for his youth, and the high hopes he had cherished; and although he might no longer yearn to possess her she would remain nostalgically dear to him while life endured.”
“He didn't choose between me and you, Julia: it was between me and ruin.”
“Lord, if we were all to marry our first loves what a plague of ill-assorted marriages there would be!”
“She thought that Fontley had suffered as much from a negligent mistress as from an improvident master.”
“No, but on the other hand you don't enact me Cheltenham tragedies when I've barely swallowed my breakfast.”
“I’ll say no more about that, or I’ll be falling into the dismals”
“Julia stood for his youth, and the high hopes he had cherished; and although he might no longer yearn to possess her she would remain nostalgically dear to him while life endured. Yet,”
“Yellow decided to risk for a butterfly.
For courage she hung right beside the other cocoon and began to spin her own.
'Imagine, I didn't even know I could do this. That's some encouragement that i'mon the right track. If I have the stuff inside me to make cocoons—maybe the stuff of butterflies is there too.”
“Somewhere to the eastward a wolf howled; lightly, questioningly. I knew the voice, for I had heard it many times before. It was George, sounding the wasteland for an echo from the missing members of his family. But for me it was a voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role; a world which I had glimpsed and almost entered...only to be excluded, at the end, by my own self.”
“You said you'd give me half an hour!'
'And you said you'd satisfy me whenever I wanted it. I want it now.' He removed is jacket. 'Drop the towel.'
'I-I never agreed to be naked!”
“Well, then, happy news! Hakuna matata and all that," Ian said cheerily. "We'll rest and have a fine dining moment while we wait." He looked around at the various airport fast-food choices. "Well, er, we'll rest...”
“Isolation offered its own form of companionship”
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