Quotes About Reflection

His days were full and they were filled decently, he supposed it was all a man ought to ask. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.

Once—twice—you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake—I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me—I understood. It was too late for happiness—but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on—don't take it from me now!

Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations—the things that protect married people from each other. We've been too close together—that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls.

Lily smiled at her classification of her friends. How different they had seemed to her a few hours ago! Then they had symbolized what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving up. That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities: now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way. Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm.

La lectura debería ser un acto de creación, como el escribir.

At least, she continued, it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself -- she drew together her troubled brows -- but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.

It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about," she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them. But

to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.

no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.

After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles, he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

Lily walked on unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of life.

The drawing-room door opened, and two high-stocked and ample-coated young men came in—two Jim Ralstons, so to speak. Delia had never before noticed how much her husband and his cousin Joe were alike: it made her feel how justified she was in always thinking of the Ralstons collectively.

All these sights, sounds and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain

I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.

She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly; she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people?

He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from new things. Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.

He started to walk across the Common, and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting. She had a gray silk sunshade over her head—how could he have ever imagined her with a pink one?

You like so much to be alone?" "Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.

It seems cruel,' she said, 'that after a while nothing matters… any more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labeled: 'Use unknown.

Perhaps, if I hadn't been, once before—I mean, if I'd always been a prudent deliberate Ralston, it would have been kinder to Tina in the end." Dr. Lanskell sank his gouty bulk into the chair behind his desk, and beamed at her through ironic spectacles. "I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.