Quotes from Max Beerbohm

Despite her dress, which was of a tremendous tartan, she diffused the pale authentic radiance of a spirituality most high, most simple.

Why did she marry you?" "I think she was fatigued by my importunities. She was not very strong. But it may be that she married me out of pique. She never told me. I did not inquire." "Yet you were very happy with her?" "While she lived, I was ideally happy.

Those who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

At my age, a man husbands his resources. He says nothing that he does not really mean.

Well, the Scots are a self-seeking and a resolute, but a shy, race; swift to act, when swiftness is needed, but seldom knowing quite what to say.

Sit down! You bewilder me," said the Duke. "Explain yourself!" he commanded. "Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?" "I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has a right to some explanation from the woman who has ruined his life.

And now," she passed her hand across her eyes, "now it is all over. The idol has come sliding down its pedestal to fawn and grovel with all the other infatuates in the dust about my feet.

Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry. We resented each other. She envied me my beauty, my dress. I envied the little fool her privilege of being always near to you.

I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased--short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.

An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow.

The arresting feature of his costume was a mulberry-coloured coat, with brass buttons. This, to any one versed in Oxford lore, betokened him a member of the Junta.

I left off loving you when I found that you loved me. There is the premiss. Very well! Is it likely that I shall begin to love you again because you can't leave off loving me?

Yet, though a Greek would have railed at her asymmetry, and an Elizabethan have called her "gipsy," Miss Dobson now, in the midst of the Edwardian Era, was the toast of two hemispheres.

She may not have had that conscious, separate, and quite explicit desire to be a mother with which modern playwrights credit every unmated member of her sex. But she did know that she could love. And

Mr. President," said The MacQuern, "I present Mr. Trent-Garby, of Christ Church." "The Junta is honoured," said the Duke, bowing. Such was the ritual of the club.

He stared blankly out of the window, at the greyness and blackness of the sky. What a day! What a climate! Why did any sane person live in England? He felt positively suicidal.

The dandy must be celibate, cloistral; is, indeed, but a monk with a mirror for beads and breviary—an anchorite, mortifying his soul that his body may be perfect.

She was, indeed, far too human a creature to care much for art.

He despised himself for wishing to forget she despised him.

She was a nymph to whom men's admiration was the greater part of life.

the dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

To die "untimely," as men called it, was the timeliest of all deaths for one who had carved his youth to greatness

Her love for her own image was not cold aestheticism. She valued that image not for its own sake, but for sake of the glory it always won for her.

Here was he, going to die for her; and here was she, blaming him for a breach of manners. Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand.