Quotes

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. ~ Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity. ~ Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy "Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?" ~ Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy "Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body." ~ The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster "Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness." ~ The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes with the sword of justice. ~ The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. ~ The Call of the Wild by Jack London There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. ~ The Call of the Wild by Jack London There is a patience of the wild—dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself—that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food. ~ The Call of the Wild by Jack London He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move. ~ The Call of the Wild by Jack London