Psychological Novels

"秦钟既死，宝玉痛哭不止，李贵等好容易劝解半日方住，归时还带余哀。贾母帮了几十两银子，外又另备奠仪，宝玉去吊祭。七日后便送殡掩埋了，别无记述。只有宝玉日日感悼，思念不已，然亦无可如何了。又不知过了几时才罢。"

"谁信世间有此境，游来宁不畅神思？"

"他便料定天地间灵淑之气只钟于女子，男儿们不过是些渣滓浊沫而已。因此把一切男子都看成浊物，可有可无。"

"巧者勞而智者憂，無能者無所求，飽食而遨游，泛若不系之舟。"

"我就是个多愁多病身，你就是那倾国倾城貌。"

"看看三日的光阴，凤姐宝玉躺在床上，连气息都微了。合家都说没了指望了，忙的将他二人的后事都治备下了。贾母、王夫人、贾琏、平儿、袭人等更哭的死去活来。只有赵姨娘外面假作忧愁，心中称愿。"

"花魂点点无情绪，鸟梦痴痴何处惊。"

"至次日乃是四月二十六日，原来这日未时交芒种节。尚古风俗：凡交芒种节的这日，都要设摆各色礼物，祭饯花神，言芒种一过，便是夏日了，众花皆卸，花神退位，须要饯行。闺中更兴这件风俗，所以大观园中之人都早起来了。那些女孩子们，或用花瓣柳枝编成轿马的，或用绫锦纱罗叠成干旄旌幢的，都用彩线系了，每一棵树头每一枝花上，都系了这些物事。满园里绣带飘摇，花枝招展，更兼这些人打扮的桃羞杏让，燕妒莺惭，一时也道不尽。"

"花谢花飞花满天，红消香断有谁怜？"

"侬今葬花人笑痴，他年葬侬知是谁？"

"There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery."

"How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?"

"Truth shall prevail — don't you know Magna est veritas . . . Yes, when it gets a chance. There is a law, no doubt — and likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice. It is not Justice — the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune — the ally of patient Time — that holds an even and scrupulous balance."

"She said we lied. Poor soul! Well — let's leave it to Chance, whose ally is Time, that cannot be hurried, and whose enemy is Death, that will not wait."

"It was a great peace, as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too — who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?"

"You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends."

"Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!"

"Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory."

"Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work."

"The last word is not said, — probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose — at least, not by us who know so many truths about either. My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions — and safe — and profitable — and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone — and as short-lived, alas!"

"Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life."

"Going home must be like going to render an account."

"A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns."

"This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still."

"I respected the intense, almost passionate, absorption with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous markings, he could see other things, an image of something as perishable and defying destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues displaying a splendour unmarred by death."

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun."

"That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer."

"There is a weird power in a spoken word... And a word carries far — very far — deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space."

"The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind."

"It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much — everything — in a flash — before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence."

"For it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge."

"Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!."

"There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten — before the end is told — even if there happens to be any end to it."

"They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything."

"There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea."

"I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works."

"All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love."

"Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors — these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like a flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it."

"To be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done."

"Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."

"Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure."

"The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing," he said. "Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged."

"Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night."

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."

"An overwhelming desire to help, or to be admired, came over him."

"I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon — down here everybody thinks he’s Christ."

"What do you think?" shouted Razumikhin, louder than ever, "you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's. In the first case you are a man, in the second you're no better than a bird. Truth won't escape you, but life can be cramped."

"The lodgers, one after another, squeezed back into the doorway with that strange inner feeling of satisfaction which may be observed in the presence of a sudden accident, even in those nearest and dearest to the victim, from which no living man is exempt, even in spite of the sincerest sympathy and compassion."

"I like it when people lie! Lying is man's only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie—you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man."

""Where is it?" thought Raskolnikov. "Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!...How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!...And vile is he who calls him vile for that," he added a moment later."