Kristin Hannah
- The Nightingale
She wanted to say something more, maybe "kiss me" or "don't go" or "say I matter to you," but it was already too late, the moment - whatever it was - was past.
Khaled Hosseini
- The Kite Runner
I slipped the picture back where I had found it. Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it. Closing Sohrab's door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away, unannounced in the middle of the night.
Elizabeth Gaskell
- Wives and Daughters
It was a flaming love-letter from Mr. Coxe; who professed himself unable to go on seeing her day after day without speaking to her of the passion she had inspired -an 'eternal passion,' he called it; on reading which Mr. Gibson laughed a little. 'Would she not look kindly at him? Would she not think of him whose only thought was of her?' with a very proper admixture of violent compliments to her beauty. She was fair, not pale; her eyes were lodestars, her dimples marks of Cupid's fingers.
Jane Austen
- Pride and Prejudice
I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.
John Steinbeck
- East of Eden
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in memory. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
John Steinbeck
- East of Eden
You're not clever. You don't know what you want. You have no proper fierceness. You let other people walk over you. Sometimes I think you're a weakling who will never amount to a dog turd. Does that answer your question? I love you better. I always have.
Jane Austen
- Persuasion
They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.
Margaret Leroy
- The Soldier's Wife
That night I dream about him. In the dream he's holding me close - just holding me, no kiss, no sexual touch, just his body pressed entirely against me, wrapped so close around mine, as you might hold someone you loved after a long separation. In the dream, this is the most natural thing - how things are meant to be. But when I wake the dream appalls me.
William Makepeace Thackeray
- Vanity Fair
Since then I have thought of but one woman in the world, and that was you. I think there is no hour of the day has passed for twelve years that I haven't thought of you. I came to tell you this before I went to India, but you did not care, and I hadn't the heart to speak. You did not care whether I stayed or went.
