Life and Existence

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

 

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

 

I am known in parts of the world by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ.

 

Per caputque pedesque .

 

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

 

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

 

Proud and insolent youth, prepare to meet thy doom.

 

All children, except one, grow up.

 

Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy.

 

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

 

He watched, stunned, and while he was watching, Rick died. He could tell when it happened. There was a difference.

 

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.