cezara’s Reviews > Villette > Status Update

"habituated to be passed by as a shadow in Life's sunshine: it is a new thing to see one testily lifting his hand to screen his eyes because you tease him with an obtrusive ray."

"this cordiality belonged in no shape to me: it was a part of himself: it was the honey of his temper; it was the balm of his mellow mood[...]Does the nectarine love either the bee or bird it feeds? Is the sweetbriar enamoured of the air?"

"intolerable encroachments of despair [...]I used to feel it, like a baleful air or sigh, penetrate deep, and make motion pause at my heart,[..]The letter - the well-beloved letter- would not come"

"a subdued glow from the soul outward"

"But I was not only going to hide a treasure - I meant to bury a grief. [...] lingering, like any other mourner, beside a newly-solded grave. "

"a dell, deep-hollowed in forest secresy; it lies in dimness and mist: its herbage pale and humid. A storm makes a wide gap amongst the oak-trees; the breeze sweeps in; the sun looks down; the sad, cold dell, becomes a deep cup of lustre; high summer pours her blue glory and her golden light of that beauteous sky, which till now the starved hollow never saw. "

"Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood. "

"Where, indeed, does the moon not look well? What is the scene, confined or expansive, which her orb does not hollow?"

"My calm little room seemed somehow like a cave in the sea[...]far, far off, like a tide retiring from a shore of the upper world- a world so high above that the rush of its largest waves, the dash of its fiercest breakers could sound down in this submarine home, only like murmurs and a lullaby. "

"too resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder"

"galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future. Motive there was none why I should try to recever or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown terrors. "

"Besides, I seemed to hold two lives- the life of thought, and that of reality"

"In the double gloom of trees and fog[...] I believe I would have followed that frank tread, through continual night, to the world's end."

"While I waited, I would not reflect. I fixedly looked at the street-stones, where the door-lamp shone, and counted them, and noted their shapes, and the glitter of wet on their angles."