По морю прочь

"Упадок и разрушение Римской империи"? Чудеснейшая книга, я знаю. Мой дорогой отец всегда нам её цитировал, в результате чего мы дали себе слово не прочесть из неё ни строчки.

Мне всегда казалось, что религия подобна коллекционированию жуков. Одному чёрные жуки нравятся, другому - нет, а спорить об этом без толку.

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

Знаете, иногда мне кажется, что умереть невыносимо именно потому, что перестанешь видеть вокруг красоту.

Зря многие думают, будто дети счастливы. Наоборот - они несчастны.

С палубы корабля им показалось еще, что город похож на трусливо припавшего к земле, сидящего на корточках скрягу.

- По-вашему, со мной очень трудно общаться?

• Это можно сказать обо всех умных людях, когда они молоды, - ответила Хелен.
• Да, конечно, умён я исключительно...

He had never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men and women. He thought for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life.

«You've promised to marry both Oliver and Perrott?» he concluded. «Not exactly promised,» said Evelyn. «I can't make up my mind which I really like best. Oh how I detest modern life!» she flung off. «It must have been so much easier for the Elizabethans! I thought the other day on that mountain how I'd have liked to be one of those colonists, to cut down trees and make laws and all that, instead of fooling about with"

Among the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her niece should she stay was a room cut off from the rest of the house, large, private-a room in which she could play, read, think, defy the world, a fortress as well as a sanctuary. Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the age of twenty-four.