Dependency is a marvelous thing. It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctor or material.
Kathleen, in The Addiction; screenplay by Nicholas St. John
Athos was an advocate that every one should be left to his own free will. He never gave advice but when it was asked; and even then he required to be asked twice.
People in general, he said, only asked advice not to follow it or if they did follow it, it was for the sake of having someone to blame for having given it.
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers, Ch. XXXIV
"Unfortunately for you, it was Hercule Poirot who retrieved your shoebuckle that day."
Hercule Poirot, in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (Television adaptation)
"What makes you think I want something? Maybe I just like. . . being here."
Maggie, in the movie Wild Cactus
The languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought to have been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things are part of life itself; but languor — the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse — that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.
Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Book I, Chapter Four
Anselmo slowed the truck and turned west onto a dirt road. I knew immediately we were on the road to Torim, for there was something significantly different about how it made me feel—the dirt was like pink flour, so light and fine that the truck raised plumes of dust the same color as the sky, as if the road had been milled from countless sunsets.
Heather Valencia, Queen of Dreams, Chapter 8
I've always found wreaths hideously sad, like decorative lifesavers thrown out too late."Very pretty," I say.
Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife, Chapter 1
Mike's greatest expense was the installation of louvered jalousies on the sea side. These were, as the man said about his friend's third marriage, a triumph of hope over experience.
Donald McNutt Douglas, Rebecca's Pride, Chapter 6
Bloomsbury in 1938 was rather like a cask of Napoleon brandy. It had been topped up so often that little remained but its reputation.
James Byrom, Or Be He Dead
"You don't mind the sun," said Ruth.
"How do you know?"
"They used to hide from it, at the house."
"They were more vulnerable, Ruth, than you or I."
"What do you mean?"
"We draw our personal darkness around us to keep us safe from
the sun."
Tanith Lee, Personal Darkness, Chapter 34
"Do you mean to say that you two ladies were alone in my Montmartre quarters with a cobra and a dying man?"
"He was dead by the time we arrived, Quentin," I assured him. "It was perfectly proper."
Carole Nelson Douglas, Irene at Large, Chapter 24
"Then," said D'Artagnan, letting his arm fall, as if overcome by discouragement, "it is useless to struggle any longer; I may as well blow my brains out, and put an end to the matter at once."
"That's the last folly to be committed," said Athos, "seeing that that is the only one for which there is no remedy."
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers, Ch. XLVII
So I'm writing you this letter to let you know about this business and I reckon I've been a fool but it looks like a man just kind of has to go it blind and there is not any blazed trail to follow.
Jim Gordon, in Robert E. Howard, The Dead Remember, in Trails in Darkness
Were I penning an elegant romance, I should tell how I vanquished Tope Braxton by a combination of higher intelligence, boxing skill and deft science that defeated his brute strength. But I must stick to facts in this chronicle.
Robert E. Howard, Black Hound of Death, in Trails in Darkness
Somehow I twisted aside and escaped those thunderous hoofs, that else had hammered me into a red pulp, and rolling aside, gained my feet, one thought uppermost in my mind—drawn from the shapeless void and materialized into concrete substance, the fiend was vulnerable to material weapons.
Robert E. Howard, The Hoofed Thing, in Trails in Darkness
I did not know till now how irresolute a character was mine.
Maud Ruthyn in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas, Chapter XXVIII
Suddenly his life had become intensely interesting.
James, in Blood Curse, Chapter 5, by Janice Harrell
"I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon"; that was enough then. Is more needed now?
Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper's game-cock maturity with a sturdier fowl. I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat before my cousin... I had my sure and secret defence, like a talisman worn in the bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped. So I told him what was not in fact the truth, that I usually had a glass of champagne about that time, and asked him to join me.
Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Book I, Chapter Two
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