Nick Newman

“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself-it only requires opportunity. You do not suppose Dempster had any motive for drinking beyond the craving for drink; the presence of brandy was the only necessary condition.

And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own. A whole park full of tame or timid-eyed animals to torment at his will would not serve him so well to glut his lust of torture; they could not feel as one woman does; they could not throw out the keen retort which whets the edge of hatred.

[...] poor Janet's soul was kept like a vexed sea, tossed by a new storm before the old waves have fallen.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“...the whole sky overhead seemed trembling under the shock of the footprints of the storm.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“After all the packing was done and all the arrangements had been made, Amos felt the oppression of that blank interval in which one has nothing left to think of but the dreary future - the separation from the loved and familiar, and the chilling entrance on the new and strange. In every parting there is an image of death.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin'; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula