- Do you recall the marbled endpapers in the Spenser that I used to read to you on crisp fall evenings just such as this? If so, then you, my dearest one, can see the sky as I saw it here tonight, for the colors swirled across the heavens in just such a happy profusion. (3)
- No wonder simple men have always had their gods dwell in the high places. For as soon as a man lets his eye drop from the heavens to the horizon, he risks setting it on some scene of desolation. (4)
- Perhaps it was the darkness, or the different season. perhaps my biliousness and grief and exhaustion. Perhaps simply that twenty years is a very long time for an active mind to retain any memory, much less one with dark and troubled edges, begging to be forgot. (10)
- I realize that lust stands high in the list of deadly sins. And yet lust -- the tightening throat, the flushed cheeks, the raging appetite -- is the only word accurate to describe the sensation I felt that morning, as the painted door closed and I was left with the liberty of all those books. (18)
- She was wearing a simple gown in a shade of palest lemon, so that she seemed to amplify the bright, snow-refracted sunlight that poured down from the chapel's high transoms. Suddenly, she looked up, directing her gaze right at me. Her hair was glossy black, and her eyes -- her intelligent, expressive eyes -- were dark and shining as a Spaniard's. When I met those eyes, my words flew away, as if they had risen up through the window panes and taken wing on the cold air. (60)
- "Drawing -- decorative landscapes in quiet pastels. But may we learn to hack life out of stone like Michelangelo? Or push juicy oil paint around canvas to portray human agony, like a Goya? 'Oh, draw, by all means, little girl, but please, don't aspire to be an artist.'..." (63)
- "to gain another language can be to see into another soul, do you not think?" (63)
- I found I could not apply myself to writing or reflection, unless it was writing verses to the beauty of her voice, and reflecting upon the vibrancy of her mind. She was the woman who had haunted my imagination, noble yet unpretentious, serious yet lively. It took no very vast period of time for me to realize that I was in love. (75)
- We had jested privately that if it were a man-child, the circumstances of his conception would oblige us to name him Achilles. But we had a little woman, and so I was free to call her by the name that had become dearest in the world to me: her mother's. I named our firstborn Margaret. (88)
- I also put in place an ambitious scheme for the garden. It is a pleasure to complete the design of Nature by adding something to the landscape, rather than merely denuding it for the production of fuel and fodder. (114)
- It was not all science with him: a row of orange fungus was an elven staircase, a cobweb that fairies' lace handkin. (116)
- For instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence. In times as hard as these are now become, I cannot think this an unfortunate barrier. (133)
- You must not think, my dearest dear, that because my letters are not so frequent these last weeks, my thoughts of you are any less than constant. You are before me the first moment I awaken and the last before I sleep, and often you, or one or another of my little women, or all in merry concert, visit in my dreams. (159)
- Who is the brave man -- he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination. The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads. And yet I do not think it heroic to march into fields of fire, whipped on one's way only by fear of being called craven. Sometimes, true courage requires inaction; that one sit at home while war rages, if by doing so one satisfies the quiet voice of honorable conscience. (168)
- "The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed -- what you sincerely believed, including the commandment 'thou shalt not kill' -- acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you -- I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong -- how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible." And even as I said this, I knew that if I stood again in the cattle show ground, and heard him promise to go to war, I would hold my piece, again, even knowing what terrible days were to follow. For to have asked him to do otherwise would have been to wish him a different man. And I knew then that I loved this man. This inconstant, ruined dreamer. (258-259)
jun 7 2022 ∞
jun 13 2022 +