Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
Its never too late to be who you might have been
. . . it was the last weakness he meant to indulge in and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice . . .
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.
. . . his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.
There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.
Imagination is a licensed trespasser it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.
For there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
. . . there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.
Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.
He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched--he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitudeaawhich was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tonesaaEppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us.
. . . he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.
. . . the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .
When Squire Cass's standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr. Osgood's, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut, pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its freshness--everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire, in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at Squire Cass's.
Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.
. . . people who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion,--when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.
If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.
Picture Quotes to Inspire and Delight