Zuleika Dobson

Death, as he had said, cancelled all engagements.

I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.

One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally. In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsage to make a simple and direct statement. So what is one to do? The dilema needs a whole volume to itself.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost—he becomes just an unit in unreason.

But the loveliest face in all the world will not please you if you see it suddenly, eye to eye, at a distance of half an inch from your own.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

It is the privilege of nobility to condescend.

The true conjurer finds his guerdon in the consciousness of work done perfectly and for its own sake.

Our hero's unreasoning rage was fed by a not unreasonable jealousy. It was clear to him that Zuleika had forgotten his existence. To-day, as soon as he had killed her love, she had shown him how much less to her was his love than the crowd's. And now again it was only the crowd she cared for. He followed with his eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously, confidingly, producing a penny from one lad's elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another's neck and collar, half a crown from another's hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers: "Well, this is rather queer!

Oh,” every stair creaked faintly, “I ought to have been marble!

Does the stag in his hour of victory need a diploma from the hind?

You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.

Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system.

But the dullard’s envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

She was one of those who are born to make chaos cosmic.

He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.

From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.

It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit—that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The

The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him—some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.

I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster.

The moon, like a gardenia in the night’s button-hole—but no! why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else—usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance?... The moon, looking like nothing whatsoever but herself, was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly on the sun-dial at the centre of the lawn.

To slur and sully, to belittle and drag down—that was what the world always tried to do.

He sat gazing into the past.

Told? I am a Gallio for such follies.

It is easier, as Michelet suggested, for a woman to change her opinion of a man than for him to change his opinion of himself.

In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement.

Nature, fashioning him, had fashioned also a pedestal for him to stand and brood on, to pose and sing on. Off that pedestal he was lost.

Byron!—he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to “The Times” about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Dear posterity was of a sentimental, not a realistic, habit.