"My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget that they are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy sky, and a green flowery Eden, in my brain; but without, I am perfectly aware, lies at my feet a rough tract to travel, and around me gather black tempests to encounter."
-from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
"She did not talk much about religion; but those who noticed her knew that it was the unseen banner which she was following. The low-breathed sentences which she spoke into the ear of the sufferer and the dying carried them upwards to God."
-from Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell
"A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world , the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feelings she had. This was a sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely."
-from Atonement by Ian McEwan
"When you live for a long time in one place you begin to confuse your life with the city; its avenues and landmarks come to stand for your memories until you become the tourist of your own past, viewing a younger self with the fascination of someone just passing through. For so many, the past has gone soft with distance, so that when they talk of a building that used to be beautiful or an avenue that once burst with yellow flowers in March, they are really talking about a self they wish to have been. I am afraid, if I tell the story now after all these years of silence, that I will be confused for one of those dreaming tourists who point out only graceful and vital, who are happy to deal with the surface of things."
-from Loving Che
"I had hoped life would unfold like a book where each detail built on the one before it, all of it racing to a satisfying conclusion. But life is not a tidy narrative, she had said, pulling her hair back into a smooth bun. We learn this late. These scraps of memory that become untethered from the rest, flapping disconsolately in the wind, these memories are the most important of all. Memories like these remind us that life is also loose ends, small events that have no bearing on the story we come to write of ourselves."
-also from Loving Che
"Apart from ourselves, and our unhappy peculiarities, it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person's lover. There would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at the bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There'd be little cooling then."
-from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
..
Get Your Own Myspace Layouts @ MyspaceLayouts.cc !
