In that dark hour I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died. I suddenly knew I had no desire or tenderness or esteem. Nothing remained except the chill bonds of law and duty an custom.
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are.
But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.
Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.
Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.
So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher.
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.
The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life...It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free.
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.
Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.
I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
Most English gentlemen at this time believed that they had a particular aptitude for endearing themselves to the lower classes. Guy was not troubled by this illusion, but he believed he was rather liked by these particular thirty men. He did not greatly care.
You're to come away at once, out of danger. I've got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey — which isn't a wine you've ever tasted, so don't pretend. It's heaven with strawberries.
As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.
Then there was the concert where the boys refused to sing 'God Save the King' because of the pudding they had had for luncheon. One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish.
She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction.
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...
Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.
Here my last love had died.
Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.
I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade.
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.
At the door fo the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next "cross the herring pond".' 'I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think I was American.' 'He's rather odd at times.
Sebastian's life was governed by a code of such imperatives. 'I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,' 'I have to stay in bed until the sun works round the windows,' 'I've absolutely got to drink champagne tonight.
Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.
There was a change in both of us. We had lost a sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year.
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
The sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
Had he not suffered unscathed the fearful dooms of all the offended gods, of all the histories, fire, brimstone, and yawning earthquakes, plague, and pestilence? Had he not stood, like the Pompeian sentry, while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears?
I must visualize the scene, Apthorpe. When we are old men, memories of things like this will be our chief comfort.
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a view-point, the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their.
The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!
