50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Tag: Quote (Page 3 of 23)

January 21, 2019 /

“‘Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor here, I fancy I hear [Rebecca] just behind me. That quick, light footstep. I could not mistake it anywhere. And in the minstrels’ gallery above the hall. I’ve seen her leaning there, in the evenings in the old days, looking down at the hall below and calling to the dogs. I can fancy her there now from time to time. It’s almost as though I catch the sound of her dress sweeping the stairs as she comes down to dinner. . . . Do you think she can see us, talking to one another now? . . . Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?’”

—from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

January 14, 2019 /

“They only came to call at Manderley because they were curious and prying. They liked to criticize my looks, my manners, my figure, they liked to watch how Maxim and I behaved to each other, whether we seemed fond of one another, so that they could go back afterwards and discuss us, saying, ‘Very different from the old days.’ They came because they wanted to compare me to Rebecca. . . .”

—from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

January 11, 2019 /

“Unconsciously I shivered, as though someone had opened the door behind me, and let a draught into the room. I was sitting in Rebecca’s chair, I was leaning against Rebecca’s cushion, and the dog had come to me and laid his head upon my knee because that had been his custom, and he remembered, in the past, she had given sugar to him there.”

—from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

January 7, 2019 /

“There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it has always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, not the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.”

—from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

December 31, 2018 /

“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”

—from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

December 28, 2018 /

[Mr. Hepworth, asking for Roger Carbury’s thoughts on Augustus Melmotte]:

“‘You think Melmotte will turn out a failure.’

‘A failure! Of course he’s a failure, whether rich or poor;—a miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end,—too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age. What are we coming to when such as he is an honoured guest at our tables?'”

—from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

December 24, 2018 /

“There was one man who thoroughly believed that the thing at the present moment most essentially necessary to England’s glory was the return of Mr. Melmotte for Westminster. This man was undoubtedly a very ignorant man. He knew nothing of any one political question which had vexed England for the last half century . . . had no preference whatever for one form of government over another, never having given his mind a moment’s trouble on the subject. He had not even reflected how a despotic monarch or a federal republic might affect himself, and possibly did not comprehend the meaning of those terms. But yet he was fully confident that England did demand and ought to demand that Mr. Melmotte should be returned for Westminster. This man was Mr. Melmotte himself.”

—from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

December 17, 2018 /

“A man cannot always restrain his own doings and keep them within the limits which he had himself planned for them. They will very often fall short of the magnitude to which his ambition has aspired. They will sometimes soar higher than his own imagination.”

—from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

December 14, 2018 /

“Henrietta had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter.”

—from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

December 10, 2018 /

“The facts, if not true, were well invented; the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.”

—from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

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