Status Updates From Jeremy Poldark (Poldark, #3)

Different people take the same thing different ways.

Youth was so mercilessly hard in its decisions; it had its own unyielding standards and had not yet learned enough to know that time would prove them arbitrary.

The sea licked quietly at the sand, uncommunicative, saying nothing of the night.

For a last moment the silence hung like a wave, and then broke. Someone at the back of the court started to cheer, and others took it up. It was answered almost at once by boos and cries of "Shame!" Then it stopped, and a backwash in tiny rivulets of conversation lapped about the court. The clerk's gavel hammered them out of existence.

"D'you find married life less than a snare than the rest of us? We plunge into it, poor deluded devils, convinced there is something within that we're missing and must not miss. But it is a gin, is it not, with iron teeth--and once it fastens on us. . . "