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She [Mrs Lecount] twined herself in and out of every weakness in his character, as the frogs and efts twined themselves in and out of the rock-work of her Aquarium. But she made one serious mistake which very clever people in their intercourse with their intellectual inferiors are almost universally apt to commit – she trusted implicitly to the folly of a fool.

She felt a depression of spirits, a quickened sense of loss as if ghosts could haunt with their absence as much as by their presence.

"The miserable little creature [Noel Vanstone] luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness, with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, [...] had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivalled him."

"The Professor lived long enough to elevate me above the common prejudice against the reptile creation. Properly understood, the reptile creation is beautiful. Properly dissected, the reptile creation is instructive in the last degree.’ She stretched out her little finger, and gently stroked the toad’s back with the tip of it. ‘So refreshing to the touch,’ said Mrs Lecount. ‘So nice and cool this summer weather!’"

Mr Wragge: Swindler. Definition: A moral agriculturist; a man who cultivates the field of human sympathy. I am that moral agriculturist, that cultivating man. Narrow-minded mediocrity, envious of my success in my profession, calls me a Swindler. What of that? The same low tone of mind assails men in other professions in a similar manner – calls great writers, scribblers – great generals, butchers – and so on.

This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud. Its existence here, on the peninsula, is proof that everything was once something else: nothing goes away.

‘I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is – the enormous prosperity of Fools. Show me an individual Fool, and I will show you an aggregate Society which gives that highly-favoured personage nine chances out of ten – and grudges the tenth to the wisest man in existence. Look where you will, in every high place there sits an Ass.

‘My dear good lady!’ cried Miss Garth, in great amazement; ‘do you really suppose that people fall in love with each other on account of similarities in their characters? In the vast majority of cases, they do just the reverse. Men marry the very last women, and women the very last men, whom their friends would think it possible they could care about.

As a father, he regarded his family of three sons in the light of a necessary domestic evil, which perpetually threatened the sanctity of his study and the safety of his books. [...] He abandoned the entire direction of his household to the slatternly old woman who was his only servant, on the condition that she was never to venture near his books, with a duster in her hand.

Words are nomads; bad poetry renders them sedentary.

William James, who was instrumental in establishing Harvard's first psychology department, was startled by this eccentric, chaotic young woman sitting in his lectures, hair disheveled, awarding her top marks when she wrote him a note to explain she would prefer to go to the opera than sit an exam. I have often felt the same way, myself, he replied.

She remembered Baudelaire’s remark that he found it difficult to breathe when faced with a portrait by Ingres: he felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere. So insistent were the candid oval eyes that she could almost sense the processes behind them: discreet gurglings and shiftings in those flawless bodies.


Comtesse d'Haussonville

As the storyteller, I need you on my side. And we know that a story is only as good as its beginning.

The books people read,—was there ever anything more revealing?

She had never met anyone so comfortable to lean on mentally. Bodily, on the few occasions on which her aunt was out of the room, he was comfortable too; he reminded her of the very nicest of sofas,—expensive ones, all cushions. But mentally he was more than comfortable, he was positively luxurious. Such perfect rest, listening to his talk. No thinking needed. Things according to him were either so, or so.

She belongs to water the way others are proud of their distant origins. There was never any reason to break with or reject it. She chose navigation, this quintessentially human knowledge; she chose ancient artisanship and modern machines, numbers and sensations, cosmic abstractions and the sun on her face.

And though he was not much given to thinking about love, did not much care for the word, thought it had been worn to a kind of uselessness, gutted by the advertising men and the crooners, and even by politicians, some of whom seemed, recently, to have discovered it, it struck him that in the end it might just mean a willingness to imagine another’s life. To do that. To make the effort.