“When you bring an idealised relationship down to the level of an ordinary one it isn't necessarily the ordinary one that suffers'.”
“If you wish to discover a man's true feelings, it is always best to provoke him.”
“Men's tongues in some things outrun women's.”
“Her shadow kept her company along the corridor to her bedroom, preceding her like a welcoming innkeeper.”
“The most frightening blazing anger was alive in her now. It was not only Elizabeth that she could have killed but Ross. She could have thrown every piece of crockery at him, and knives and forks too. Indeed she could have attacked him knife in hand. Fundamentally there was nothing meek or mild about her. She was a fighter, and it showed now.”
“If what I feel for you is dislike -- for coming between me and my work sometime every day in the last fifteen months --if that's dislike...If being unable to forget your voice, or the way you turn your neck, or the lights in your hair -- if that's dislike...If wanting to hear that you're married and dreading to hear that you're married...If resenting the condescension that pretends you're not out of my reach...Perhaps you can identify these symptoms for me.”
“Perhaps you're right; we don't ever regain what we lightly lose.”
“For if you wish to discover a man's true feelings, it is always best to provoke him.”
“Demelza said: ‘It seems to me no man is wise enough if the woman is not wise enough.’ Ross”
“...are not all women treated by all men like something inferior, like chattels you take up and put down at will?”
“Their lives had been the tragedy of one woman who couldn’t make up her mind.”
“All the week a great thunderbolt hung over the house. All her life Demelza’s principle, though she did not know it as such, had been never to let the sun go down on her wrath. But she could very well have been buried with this wrath, because it came from a wound that knew no cure.”
“Help, help, help, I am lost in the very deeps of the earth. Not eight feet underground but two hundred; blind already but not deaf, shuddering in the warm water, fingers burning last grip loosening; one nail, one rusty nail.”
“He went down and found the body floating. Francis had been dead about an hour. In one of his hands, clutched so that they could barely unfasten it, was a rusty nail.”
“He laughed. ‘To call a woman”
“In all prospering human affairs there is a streak of hazard, a blending of good fortune with good judgment which gives the lucky man a sense of having earned his deserts and gives the deserving, if he is modest, an awareness of his luck. That”
“Having a husband, it seems to me, is a small matter like going to church. Either you trust in something or you do not. If you do not, then there's no benefit in going to church at all, is there? But if you do believe in him, then you've no excuse to be asking for proofs all the time.”
“stopped, gasping at the air. The nail turned”
“The awful catastrophe of their quarrel had evaporated in a commonplace. He”
“If there are two feelings, then I don’t think you can put them in separate compartments ever, because one is a part of the other and inseparable.”
“Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.”
“Of course, it would help if the manwould keep his shirt on whenever he came into her unconscious mind. What kind of person didn't have the decency to keep himself clothed while barging into her dreams.
a little modesty went a long way.
Yeah, but clothes on a body so fine was its own form of obscenity.
shh, mind, have some decency yourself.”
“The smile remained suspended on her face, but it was as though it had been disconnected from the emotion behind it – if there ever had been any emotion behind it.”
“برات نوشتم دیگه طاقت ندارم بشنوم که همه چیز تقصیر ژنرالا و مایه دارا و صاحبای قدرته! پس ما چه کاره ایم؟ اسم و رسم و شماره شناسنامه هایی که فقط به درد انتخابات و جنگا می خورن؟ یه ابزار تو دست مذهبیا و ایسما و ایدئولوژیا؟”
“Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures.”
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