Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the ...world, no species of composition has been so much decried.... "And what are you reading, Miss--?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about truth. I just want to know the momentary fact of things. Life isn...'t good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual. It's sensual. It's alive!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No woman ever yet either reasoned or acted long together consequentially; but some little thing, some love, some resentment, some ...present momentary interest, some supposed slight, or some humour, always breaks in upon, and oversets their most prudent resolutions and schemes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is this world of ours? A complex entity subject to sudden changes which all indicate a tendency to destruction; a swift succe...ssion of beings which follow one another, assert themselves and disappear; a fleeting symmetry; a momentary order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young ...couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Family values are a little like family vacations--subject to changeable weather and remembered more fondly with the passage of tim...e. Though it rained all week at the beach, it's often the momentary rainbows that we remember.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite an...d individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in Nature for fabri...cs in which local and spasmodic energy is required.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, th...e birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »