Term
| I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Charles Ryder |
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Term
| I had no religion. I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was excused church in the holidays. |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Charles Ryder |
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Term
| Anyway, however, you look at it, happiness doesn't have much to do with it, and that's all I want...I wish I liked Catholics more. |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Sebastian |
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Term
| But wherever she turned, it seemed her religion stood as a barrier between her and her natural good |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Julia |
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Term
| This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than ___ knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Charles Ryder |
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Term
| I caught him (the thief) with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread. |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" about Sebastian |
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Term
| One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is--no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Julia |
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Term
| I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved... |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Charles Ryder |
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Term
| Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only further stretch of carpet and door. |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Charles Ryder |
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Term
| a small red flame--a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle. |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Charles Ryder |
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Term
| It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it tis morning, burning anew among the old stones. |
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Definition
| "Brideshead Revisited" Charles Ryder |
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Term
| It depicted and enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five. |
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Definition
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Term
| He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so... |
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Definition
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Term
| We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050. |
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Definition
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Term
| In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. |
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Definition
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Term
| In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness |
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Definition
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Term
| In a lucid moment___ found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel against the rung of his chair. |
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Definition
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Term
| To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies... |
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Definition
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Term
| His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it; he wished it had been hundreds-thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption filled him with a wild hope. |
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Definition
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Term
| It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. |
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Definition
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Term
| During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. |
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Definition
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Term
| He wished they were a married couple of ten year's standing. He wished that he were walking though the streets with her just as they were doing now, but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. |
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Definition
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Term
| A thrush had alighted on a bough not five meters away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them....and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. |
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Definition
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Term
| She thought it over. "They can't do that," she said finally. "it's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything--anything--but they can;t make you believe it. They can't get inside you." |
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Definition
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Term
| "I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you--that would be the real betrayal. |
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Definition
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Term
| There are three stages in reintegration," said___, "There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance." |
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Definition
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Term
| Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. |
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Definition
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Term
| One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution." |
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Definition
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Term
| But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment--one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. |
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Definition
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Term
| In a few more seconds ____ had noticed all he needed to notice about this girl: the combination of fair hair, straight and but short, with brown eyes and no lipstick, the strict set of the mouth and square shoulders, the large breasts and the narrow waist, the premeditated simplicity of the wine-colored corduroy skirt and the unornamented white linen blouse. |
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Definition
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Term
| No, the reason why I am a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. |
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Definition
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Term
| ...although it held nothing for him he wanted to cast himself down behind the protective wall of skirts and trousers, or, better pull the collar of his dinner-jacket over his head and run out into the street. |
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Definition
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Term
| He realized that when it wasn't set in that rather chilly life-mask, her face sometimes touched upon other sorts of face by a kind of physiognomical allusion. |
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Definition
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Term
| People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening everyday. They ought to realize that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working-out, not about love, but about what they're going to do." |
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Definition
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Term
| The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love as a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechizing. |
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Definition
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Term
| It's just a sort of stodgy, stingy, caution that's the matter with us; you can't even call it looking after number one. |
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Definition
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Term
| And that;s where the trouble's going to start; being the sort of girl she is, she's going to feel bad about getting rid of you m and about doing things behind my back--she doesn't know I know about this yet--and about the whole shooting match. |
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Definition
| "Lucky Jim" Bertrand about Christine |
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Term
| You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole ona crap reservation. |
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Definition
| "Lucky Jim" Jim Dixon to Bertrand |
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Term
| Just get this straight in your so-called mind. When I see something I want, I go for it. I don't allow people of your sort to stand in my way. |
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Definition
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Term
| Well taught and sensibly taught history could do people a hell of a lot of good, But in practice it doesn't work out like that. Things get in the way, I don't quite see who's to blame for it. Bad teaching's the main thing. |
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Definition
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Term
| The sight of her seemed an irresistible attack on his own habits, standards, and ambitions: something designed to put him in his place for good. |
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Definition
| "Lucky Jim" Jim Dixon about Christine |
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Term
| What a pity, he thought, that she wasn't better looking, and that she didn't read the articles in the three-halfpenny Press which told you which color lipstick to went with which natural colors. |
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Definition
| "Lucky Jim" Jim Dixon about Margaret |
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Term
| It was luck you needed all along. With just a little luck he'd have been able to switch his life on to a momentarily adjoining track... |
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Definition
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Term
| Well, we laugh. But perhaps there is something adirable in this dissociation between what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here, once again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is duty to drive us, or not? |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" The Narrator |
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Term
| The clothes of the young lady's clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first fine throws of the discovery of aniline dyes. And what the feminine, by way of compensation fro so much else in her expected behavior, demanded of a color was brilliance, not discretion. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Ernestina |
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Term
| ____ had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Ernestina |
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Term
| The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Ernestina |
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Term
| Its clothes were black. the wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| My good woman, we can't see you here without being alarmed for your safety. A stronger squall-- |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period's standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| At first meetings she could cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address her. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Ernestina |
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Term
| If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and voice "of") a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" John Fowles |
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Term
| There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" John Fowles |
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Term
| ____ himself called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself....nulla species nova: a new species cannot enter the world. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| Given the veneer of a lady, she was made the perfect victim of a caste society. Her father had forced her out of her own class, but could not raise her to the next. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| The girl lay in complete abandonment of deep sleep, on her back. Her coat had fallen open over her indigo dress, unrelieved in its calico severity except by a small white collar at the throat. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| He stood unable to do anything but stare down, tranced by this unexpected encounter, and overcome by an equally strange feeling--not sexual, but fraternal, perhaps paternal... |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles about Sarah |
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Term
| He could not imagine what, besides despair, could drive her, in an age where women were semistic, timid, incapable of sustained physical effort, to this wild place. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles about Sarah |
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Term
| He came at last to the very edge of the rampart above her, directly over her face, and there he saw that all the sadness he had so remarked before was gone: in sleep the face was gentle, it might even have had the ghost of a smile. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles about Sarah |
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Term
| His future had always seemed to him of vast potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known place. She had reminded him of that. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| Under this swarm of waspish self-inquiries, he began to feel sorry for himself--a brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| They encouraged the mask, the safe distance; and this girl, behind her facade of humility, forbade it. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightening, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to perfection, but horizontal |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| Then she did something as strange, as shocking as if she had thrown off her clothes. She smiled |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| There was no doubt. He was one of life's victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was really a clear case of the anxiety of freedom--that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| i know such breaches of trust as yours are becoming so commonplace that to be shocked by them is to pronounce oneself an old fogey....All through human history the elect have made their cases for election. But Time allows only one plea. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Grogan |
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Term
| I do not wish to marry. I do not wish to marry because... first, because of my past, which is habituated me to loneliness. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| I know live in a world where loneliness is most easy to avoid. And I have found that I treasure it. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Sarah |
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Term
| The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment ____ begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun carriage on which rests his own corpse. |
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Definition
| "The French Lieutenant's Woman" Charles |
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Term
| They were protected by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin. But she felt safe here, half adult and half child. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Hana |
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Term
| I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Hana |
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Term
| Then he had been a thief, a married man, slipped through his chosen world with a lazy confidence, brilliant in deceit against the rich... |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Caravaggio |
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Term
| I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who traveled from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds... |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Almasy |
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Term
| What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history... |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Almasy |
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Term
| And something in him made him step back from even the naive innocence of such a remark. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Kip |
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Term
| Her hand gripped him as mud had clung along the bank of the Moro River, his fist plunging into the wet earth to stop himself slipping back into the already crossed torrent. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Kip |
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Term
| If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Kip |
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Term
| I'm not staying here much longer. I want to take you home. Get the hell out of Dodge City. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Caravaggio |
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Term
| He was accustomed to his invisibility. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Kip |
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Term
| Quite early on I had discovered the over-looked space open to those of us with a silent life. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Kip |
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Term
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Almasy |
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Term
| We are not owned or monogamous to our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Almasy |
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Term
| Though you, in spirit, I know are still in a canoe. Can swerve one around and enter a creek in seconds. Still independent. Still private. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Kip |
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Term
| Singing in the voice of a tired traveller, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Hana |
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Term
| She sees him in the field, his hands clasped over his head, then realizes this is a gesture not of pain but of his need to hold earphones tight against his brain. |
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Definition
| "The English Patient" Kip |
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