Great Throughts Treasury

"Playing defensive back was a big part in the decision. Oklahoma wanted me to be a running back, but I feel I could have a longer career and can do more at defensive back."

"People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid."

"Print it as it stands ? beautifully."

"Quote of the day: Quote of the day: We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."

"Poor Catherine's dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far."

"Sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity."

"She [was]? one of those convenient types who don't keep you explaining --minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued clusters of confessionals at St. Peters."

"She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul."

"She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject."

"She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more - this idea was as sweet as a vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land... but Isabel recognized, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end."

"She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense."

"She gazed and wondered, like a child or peasant, and paid her silent tribute to visible grandeur."

"She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS."

"She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering."

"She had been looking all round her again?at the lawn, the great trees, the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house; and while engaged in this survey she had made room in it for her companions; a comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited. She had seated herself and had put away the little dog; her white hands, in her lap, were folded upon her black dress; her head was erect, her eye lighted, her flexible figure turned itself easily this way and that, in sympathy with the alertness with which she evidently caught impressions. Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear, still smile. I've never seen anything so beautiful as this."

"She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment."

"She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities."

"She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine."

"She had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault."

"She had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone."

"She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!"

"She had never yet encountered a personage so exotic, and she always felt more at ease in the presence of anything strange. It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that was usual was inqiuitous."

"She is the one who leads the people of Little Egg Harbor to freedom."

"She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place which became, to the child?s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror."

"She liked him too much to marry him, that was the point; something told her that she should not be satisfied, and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticize would be a peculiarly discreditable act."

"She is written in a foreign tongue."

"She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone."

"She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis."

"She looked about her again, on her feet, at her scattered melancholy comrades -- some of them so melancholy as to be down on their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing; she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible in short, that one would live if one could."

"She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause."

"She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and was capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionless as if she were before a photographer's lens. I could see she had been photographed often, but somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose unfitted her for mine. At first I was extremely pleased with her lady-like air, and it was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines, to see how good they were and how far they could lead the pencil. But after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression -- she herself had no sense of variety. You may say that this was my business, was only a question of placing her. I placed her in every conceivable position, but she managed to obliterate their differences. She was always a lady certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing. There were moments when I was oppressed by the serenity of her confidence that she WAS the real thing."

"She was a plain-faced old woman, without graces and without any great elegance, but with an extreme respect for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain these?when the explanation was asked as a favor; and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her"

"She was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts, and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar...It may be affirmed without delay that She was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right; impulsively, she often admired herself...Every now and then she found out she was wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself. She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization, should move in the realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic."

"She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth."

"Since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate."

"She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table."

"So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!"

"So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. It isn't so much your BEING 'right'--it's your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so. Oh but you're just as bad yourself. You can't resist me when I point that out. She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. I can't indeed resist you. Then there we are! said Strether."

"Some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile."

"Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw- colored and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity."

"Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway."

"Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded."

"Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it."

"Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain."

"Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!"

"Summer afternoon ? summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

"Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught."

"Tell the boys to follow, to be faithful, to take me seriously."

"Thank goodness you're a failure-- it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you--look at the successes. Would you BE one, on your honor?"