40 quotes found
“Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.”
“I wait, with some impatience in my pulse, but no doubt in my breast.”
“Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.”
“In catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.”
“His veins were dark with a vivid belladonna tincture, the essence of jealousy.”
“The spring which moved my energies lay far away beyond seas, in an Indian isle.”
“Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”
“The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.”
“I do not think the sunny youth of either will prove the forerunner of stormy age. I think it is deemed good that you two should live in peace and be happy - not as angels but as few are happy among...”
“~Do you like him much?~I told you I like him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much? He is full of faults.~Is he?~All boys are.~More than girls?~Very likely. Wise people say it i...”
“...[M]y inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose. I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.”
“I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered ...”
“For once a hope was realized. I held in my hand a morsel of real solid joy: not a dream, not an image of the brain, not one of those shadowy chances imagination pictures, and on which humanity star...”
“A strong, vague persuasion that it was better to go forward than backward, and that I could go forward— that a way, however narrow and difficult, would in time open— predominated over other feeling...”
“Dr. John, throughout his whole life, was a man of luck - a man of success. And why? Because he had the eye to see his opportunity, the heart to prompt to well-timed action, the nerve to consummate ...”
“The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and rather st...”
“Besides, I seemed to hold two lives—the life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of t...”
“Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?”
“. . . if there was a hope of comfort for any moment, the heart or head of no human being in this house could yield it . . .”
“I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only b...”
“I replied that I did not quite know what my ailment had been, but that I had certainly suffered a good deal especially in mind. Further, on this subject, I did not consider it advisable to dwell, f...”
“This little man was of the order of beings who must not be opposed, unless you possessed an all-dominant force sufficient to crush him at once.”
“I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.”
