It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men's talk without listening to it, could think—about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera—without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done something with her hands.

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it, except as something superficially strange.

Now there is nothing in this world I abominate worse, than to be interrupted in a story...

The law is sic a ass - a idiot.

I am saying nothing.

What Mr Chivery thought of these things, or how much or how little he knew about them, was never gathered from himself. It has been already remarked that he was a man of few words; and it may be here observed that he had imbibed a professional habit of locking everything up.

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.

He did nothing, but he looked on as few other men could have done.

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.

You can say I give you this information as a dispassionate observer.

MRS ALLONBY I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk. HESTER I think the stupid people talk a great deal. MRS ALLONBY Ah, I never listen!