Sublime

C’était un roman sans intrigue, avec un seul personnage, la simple étude psychologique d’un jeune Parisien qui occupait sa vie en essayant de réaliser, au dix-neuvième siècle, toutes les passions et les modes de penser des autres siècles, et de résumer en lui les états d’esprit par lequel le monde avait passé, aimant pour leur simple artificialité

This is what happens to a man who was made for a great love and not a suit when he does not feel the love. He closes in. He becomes weary. On the bus he looked out of the top-deck windows and saw less of life and felt less sturdy, less sexy, less rich. He was beginning to forget his magnificence. A darkness was coming down over his face like the pu

He was short and sturdy and as a general thing uninspired, and Mr Coyle, who found no amusement in believing in him, had never thought him less exciting than as he stared now out of a face from which you could no more guess whether he had caught an idea than you could judge of your dinner by looking at a dish-cover. Young Lechmere concealed such ac

wrote about Scott, for example, but I gave him a cover name: Julian [in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”].

But he sat in an agony of fear lest Raffles should be overheard in his loud and plain references to past facts – lest Mrs Bulstrode should be even tempted to listen at the door. How could he hinder her, how betray his terror by opening the door to detect her? She was a woman of honest direct habits, and little likely to take so low a course in orde

My father had money in his account which belonged to me but he was very reluctant to send it because he wanted me to come home—to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.