august

“Why d’you read then?”
“Partly for pleasure, and because it’s a habit and I’m just as uncomfortable if I don’t read as if I don’t smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I’ve got out of the book all that’s any use to me, and I can’t get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one’s like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one and at last the flower is there.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Why did you look at the sunset?'
Philip answered with his mouth full:
Because I was happy.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“It's no good crying over spilt milk, because all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage