Rhoda Quotes

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh. E is for Ernest who choked on a peach. F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech. G is for George smothered under a rug. H is for Hector done in by a thug. I is for Ida who drowned in a lake. J is for James who took lye by mistake. K is for Kate who was struck with an axe. L is for Leo who choked on some tacks. M is for Maud who was swept out to sea. N is for Neville who died of ennui. O is for Olive run through with an awl. P is for Prue trampled flat in a brawl. Q is for Quentin who sank on a mire. R is for Rhoda consumed by a fire. S is for Susan who perished of fits. T is for Titus who flew into bits. U is for Una who slipped down a drain. V is for Victor squashed under a train. W is for Winnie embedded in ice. X is for Xerxes devoured by mice. Y is for Yorick whose head was bashed in. Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.

In my opinion, sexiness comes down to three things: chemistry, sense of humor, and treatment of waitstaff at restaurants.

Do you believe in the value of truth, my dear, or don’t you?” “Of course I believe in the truth,” said Rhoda, staring. “Yes, you say that, but perhaps you haven’t thought about it. The truth hurts sometimes – and destroys one’s illusions.” “I’d rather have it all the same.” said Rhoda. “So would I. But I don’t know that we’re wise.

Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?

May I ask what you have in your black leather bag with gold buckles?" "Everything." They were climbing a narrow staircase. Rhoda stopped to look when Jennie opened her bag. "You do have everything." "I have even more," Jennie said modestly. "Two windows that I left at home.

That is my face,' said Rhoda, 'in the looking-glass behind Susan's shoulder - that is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

If all we are is what people think we are, then we’re all screwed.

Survival, it turned out, wasn't the same as living.

Passion leads to fierce heartbreak, Rhoda. You might think twice about how badly you wish for it.

Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet she comes cringing to our sides because for al our cruelty there is always some name, some face which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.

the white spaces that lie between hour and hour

If I could believe," said Rhoda, "that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You do not see me come...I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute, and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view--one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know--your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running in the scent... But since I wish above all things to have lodgment, I pretend, as I go upstairs lagging behind Jinny and Susan, to have an end in view. I pull on my stockings as I see them pull on theirs. I wait for you to speak and then speak like you. I am drawn here across London to a particular spot, to a particular place, not to see you or you or you, but to light my fire at the general blaze of you who love wholly, indivisibly, and without caring in the moment.

I've come to believe that virtue isn’t a condition of character. It’s an elected action. It’s a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we’ll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness.

It was after Nick had left me that I learned the lesson: its when you don't love somebody that you do notice the little things. Then you mind them. You mind them terribly.

Call me old-fashioned, but whenever I see those wire-fortified ribbons, I have the secret stab of nostalgia for old-timey ribbon, the kind whose ends flop like spaniel ears. I'm suspicious of unnaturally perky ribbon.

The idea is that the woman's heritage and background are just as important as the man's. Many women see taking a man's name as a gesture of symbolic oppression. It's like saying to the woman, 'Who you are as a person isn't as important as who I am.

I think maybe I'd still nod and smile and have lunch with him. I think maybe I'd still go to the Noam Chomsky documentary later that evening. And maybe I'd even marry him a couple of weeks later. Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?

Life, how I have dreaded you," said Rhoda, "oh, human beings, how I have hated you! How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube! Now as I climb this mountain, from the top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with brown-paper parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smelt so unpleasant, too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you changed me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into wastepaper baskets with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.

Granny panties. White as a flag, but with no surrender.

Una noche vi una estrella corriendo entre las nubes, y le dije: ''Consúmeme''.

I'm not the head of Scotland Yard," said Mrs. Oliver, retreating from dangerous ground. "I'm a private individual -" "Oh, you're not that," said Rhoda, confusedly complimentary.

Right now I am thinking of writing another cookbook. All cookbooks have a gimmick, and mine will be that it contains recipes that I have invented and named after famous people. Some of them are: Brisket of Brynner (very lean meat) Carson Casserole (it's got everything on it) Barbecued Walters Marinated Maude Roasted Rhoda King King Curry (it will feed about eight thousand people) Fricassee of Fonzi Pickled Rickles Raquel Relish Leftovers à la Gabors

There Rhoda sits staring at the blackboard,' said Louis, 'in the schoolroom, while we ramble off, picking here a bit of thyme, pinching here a leaf of southernwood while Bernard tells a story. Her shoulder-blades meet across her back like the wings of a small butterfly. And as she stares at the chalk figures, her mind lodges in those white circles, it steps through those white loops into emptiness, alone. They have no meaning for her. She has no answer for them. She has no body as the others have. And I, who speak with an Australian accent, whose father is a banker in Brisbane, do not fear her as I fear the others.

When you're young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn't do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship - with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community.

I must try and be good, or clever, or eccentric, for it was very evident that pretty I could never be

I hate the small looking-glass on the stairs," said Jinny. "It shows our heads only; it cuts off our heads...So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next landing, where the long glass hangs, and I see myself entire. I see my body and head in one now; for even in this serge frock they are one, my body and my head. Look, when I move my head I ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs rippled like a stalk in the wind. I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda's vagueness; I leap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move, I dance, I never cease to move and dance. I move like the leaf that moved in the hedge as a child and frightened me. i dance over these streaked, these impersonal, distempered walls with their yellow skirting as firelight dances over teapots. i catch fire even from women's cold eyes. when I read, a purple rim runs around the black edge of the textbook. yet I cannot follow any word through its changes. I cannot follow any thought from present to past. I do not stand lost, like Susan, with tears in my eyes remembering home; or lie, like Rhoda, crumpled among the ferns, staining my pink cotton green, while I dream of plants that flower under the sea, and rocks through which the fish swim slowly. I do not dream.

Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,' said Rhoda, 'to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds' wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams.

Phil and Hannah had decided that Christian guilt was better than bad math

Besides, just being heard helps the other person calm down and feel less angry. We often yell when we are angry because we want to be Heard.

Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the youngest, the most naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave...but I...am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one.

Was there really so much hatred in the universe, so much prejudice, even among people who claimed to be unbiased? Had this always been true?

If all we are is what people think we are, then we're all screwed.

In the real world, they told you who to be, not the other way around.

The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you’ll be mistook for a mollusk.

Anne’s awfully sensitive,’ said Rhoda. ‘And she’s bad about—well, facing things. If anything’s upset her, she’d just rather not talk about it,

After that first year, a classmate named Rhoda Isselbacher, who was pregnant during the exam period, informed the men she would use their bathroom whether they liked it or not.

Rhoda was not in the least envious of her sister’s fuller life, for now that they were both in their fifties there seemed to be very little difference between them.

Rhoda Palmateer, in loving memory. Rhoda’s love saved the day for many hundreds of cats and kittens who otherwise would have languished on the streets or died in shelters.

El tigre saltó, y la golondrina hundió la punta del ala en oscuras lagunas, al otro lado del mundo." Rhoda

Los omóplatos de Rhoda casi se tocan, en el centro de la espalda, como las alas de una pequeña mariposa. Mientras contempla los números de tiza, su pensamiento se aloja en esos blancos círculos. Pasa a través de las alzadas blancas y penetra en el vacío sola. No tienen sentido para ella. Ni ella tiene respuesta para ellos. Rhoda no tiene cuerpo y los otros sí.

Ye talk Bibby Cee,” explained Effie. “I talk Bibby Cee!” asked Bel in bewilderment. “Ugha,” said Effie. (By this time Bel had discovered that “Ugha” meant yes. When she asked Effie to peel the potatoes Effie said “Ugha” and peeled them forthwith). The mystery was intriguing. Bel puzzled over it all morning and finally asked Rhoda about it. “Effie says I talk Bibby Cee,” said Bel. “She says that’s why she can understand me.” “Oh yes,” said Rhoda. “They’ve got a wireless. They listen in every evening.” “B.B.C.!” exclaimed Bel. “How silly of me!

In this humor [bantering/flirtatious] she [Rhoda Nunn] seemed more than ever a challenge to his manhood. She was armed at all points. She feared nothing that he might say. No flush of apprehension; no nervous tremor; no weak self-consciousness. Yet he saw her as a woman, and desirable.

Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow—no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life—for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken—I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.

Sometimes you can just feel a person's decency in the same way that sometimes you can intuit a lack of it. Phil had the air of a man who is fully attentively engaged Josh Hannah's first fiance had the air of a man trying not to look at his watch. Phil consistently interested himself in the lives of others Josh talked about himself. Phil looked at my sister with tenderness and humor Josh looked at her as if she were an especially persistent gnat.

We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel. But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.

No.” It was then Christine went back to her kitchen, to finish the luncheon dishes there; but her suspicions were now aroused, and she wondered why the child had asked her strange question, for she knew now, and had known for a long time, that Rhoda asked nothing idly, for the pleasure of hearing her own voice, as other children did.

Los omóplatos de Rhoda casi se tocan, en el centro de la espalda, como las alas de una mariposa. Mientras contempla los números de tiza, su pensamiento se aloja en esos blancos círculos. Pasa a través de las alzadas blancas y penetra en el vacío sola. No tienen sentido para ella. Ni ella tiene respuesta para ellos. Rhoda no tiene cuerpo y los otros sí.

I'm not really a chicken-patty kinda girl," I said.

What I want to measure, what I can control, is my own response to life's challenges.

I would rather get a PhD than stand to reach for toilet paper. Though some readers might emphasize the similarities between the two activities.

An Americentric worldview, they believed, was incompatible with Christian values on the grounds that God loved all nations equally.

The USPS is the only place in the world where you will find a black guy, a white guy, and a hispanic guy playing Filipino poker! And we love it that way!

Ahí está el charco, dijo Rhoda, y no puedo cruzarlo. Oigo el crugir de la gran muela, a una pulgada de la cabeza. Su viento ruge en mi rostro. Todas las formas de vida palpable me han defraudado. Si no alargo la mano y toco algo duro, el viento me llevará a lo largo de los eternos corredores, para siempre ¿Y qué puedo tocar? Que ladrillo que piedra, para así cruzar el enorme vacío y penetrar en la seguridad de mi cuerpo?

It is the first day of the summer holidays," said Rhoda. "And now, as the train passes by these red rocks, by this blue sea, the term, done with, forms itself into one shape behind me. I see its colour. June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, 'Consume me.

I whispered. “I’m scared God’s gonna take my baby the way he took Rhoda’s. I done wrong, but my baby ain’t done nothin’. Rhoda’s boy was so small and helpless. How could God do that to him?” Bertie held me the way I’d held Rhoda. “God’s ways aren’t our ways, child. Sometimes it’s impossible for us to understand why things like this happen. Other times, he makes it clear. Like when there’s somethin’ not quite right with the baby.” She sighed. “But as hard as it is to accept, we have to trust that God knows best.

Rhoda moved off slowly, an expression of patient bafflement in her eyes; then, throwing herself on the sofa, she buried her face in a pillow and wept plaintively, peering up at her mother through her laced fingers. But the performance was not at all convincing, and Christine looked back at her child with a new, dispassionate interest, and thought: She’s an amateur so far; but she’s improving day by day. She’s perfecting her act. In a few years, her act won’t seem corny at all. It’ll be most convincing then, I’m sure.

Transcending anger happens when we are able to commit to something greater than ourselves. And, ironically, sacrifice and concern for others are the best things we can do for ourselves. Solidifying our human ties sustains us in the time of greatest need and angst.

Breeders say you always look for the great one you lost. You watch every puppy in case he’s the one. I will. I lost a great one. But I had him. And I’ll recognize him. I cry for Ben, not because I lost him, but because he had to leave and I know how much he wanted to stay with me.

That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder — that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

She pottered round now, a tall vague woman in her early fifties, with a long pale face and brown eyes which her daughter Deirdre had inherited. As she pottered she murmured to herself, ‘large knives, small knives, pudding spoons, will they need forks too? Oh, large forks, serving spoons, mats, glasses, well two glasses in case Deirdre and Malcolm want to drink beer, Rhoda probably won’t … and now, wash the lettuce …’ It was nice when the warm weather came and they could have salads for supper, she thought, though why it was nice she didn’t really know. Washing a lettuce and cutting up the things to go with it was really almost as much trouble as cooking a hot meal, and she herself had never got over an old-fashioned dislike of eating raw green leaves. When her husband had been alive they had always had a hot meal in the evenings, winter and summer alike. He needed it after a day in the City. But now he was gone and Rhoda had been living with them for nearly ten years now and everyone said how nice it was for them both, to have each other, though of course she had the children too. Malcolm was a good solid young man, very much like his father, reliable and, although of course she never admitted it, a little dull. He did not seem to mind about the hot meal in the evenings. But Deirdre was different, clever and moody, rather like she herself had been at the same age, before marriage to a good dull man and life in a suburb had steadied her.

Joseph also administered the new, secret rite of the Second Anointing for chosen couples upstairs at the store. He sealed polygamous marriages in the second-floor office, never revealing them to the Saints at large. Smith and Brigham Young kept coded records of these events, sometimes using pseudonyms. In his diary, Smith occasionally called himself “Baurak Ale.” To record his marriages, Young might write “saw E. Partridge,” a code which meant “[s]ealed [a]nd [w]ed Emily Partridge,” or “ME L. Beaman,” which would mean “married for eternity Louisa Beaman.” One of Joseph’s plural wives, Willard Richards’s sister Rhoda, lived in the store, which was also the site of Brigham Young’s soon-to-be-famous, botched seduction of British teenager Martha Brotherton.

Calmly We Walk Through This April Day Calmly we walk through this April's day, Metropolitan poetry here and there, In the park sit pauper and rentier, The screaming children, the motor-car Fugitive about us, running away, Between the worker and the millionaire Number provides all distances, It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now, Many great dears are taken away, What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn...) Besides the photo and the memory? (...that time is the fire in which we burn.) (This is the school in which we learn...) What is the self amid this blaze? What am I now that I was then Which I shall suffer and act again, The theodicy I wrote in my high school days Restored all life from infancy, The children shouting are bright as they run (This is the school in which they learn . . .) Ravished entirely in their passing play! (...that time is the fire in which they burn.) Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then? No more? No more? From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day, Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume Not where they are now (where are they now?) But what they were then, both beautiful; Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

I begin now to forget; I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality of here and now, to tap my knuckles smartly upon the edges of apparently solid objects and say, "Are you hard?" I have seen so many different things, have made so many different sentences. I have lost in the process of eating and drinking and rubbing my eyes along surfaces that thin, hard shell which cases the soul, which, in youth, shuts one in--hence the fierceness, and the tap, tap, tap of the remorseless beaks of the young. And now I ask, "Who am I?" I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt "I am you". This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. Yes, ever since old Mrs Constable lifted her sponge and pouring warm water over me covered me with flesh I have been sensitive, percipient. Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan's tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.

You are to me what fungus is to cheese

She was sitting and thinking . . . when a tiny flower fell onto her plate. This was no miracle of course, the explanation was simple, Rhoda had picked some sprays of viburnum fragrans in the kitchen garden. . . . She had brought them in and arranged them in a bowl and placed them in the middle of the table―there was no more to it than that. Rhoda was about to brush the flower from her plate when suddenly the perfection of it struck her . . . one tiny flower-head but quite perfect. It was so small and insignificant that she herself who had picked the sprays and arranged them had not noticed the beauty of it. . . . The thought of the small insignificant thing with its perfection of beauty remained with her and gave her happiness. The floweret had dropped onto her plate. Look, it said. Here I am―and there are millions like me―and each one of us is perfect―perfectly beautiful. Here's your world. It's full of beauty. Be happy in it.

She was seen as something delicate, a thing to be preserved and protected until she came of age to rule. But Rhiannon had other plans.

looking up into the void, every joy and fear inside her boiling,

teenage girl could rule the galaxy.

You’re Mrs. Dering Johnstone!” “Goodness! How did you guess?” Bel had not guessed. She had known quite definitely the moment she saw Mrs. Dering Johnstone that this was Louise’s cousin’s wife, for Louise had said that James’s wife, Rhoda, was perfectly beautiful—just like an angel—with wonderful golden hair. There could not be two people in Drumburly to fit this description, so obviously this was she.

It was humility, thought Rhoda. That was the key-note of Bel’s character. Rhoda had never prized this virtue—she had thought it overrated—but now she realised, that she had been mistaken. Humility was not just an absence of pride, it was not a negative virtue, it was a definite “fruit of the spirit”. False humility was horrible of course (vide Uriah Heep) but real humility, growing from within, was beautiful.

Later that day, when Rhoda returned from church, she had her prize tucked under her arm; it was a copy of Elsie Dinsmore, and, going at once to the park, she opened her book and began eagerly to read, as though she hoped to find there an understanding of those puzzling values she saw in others

Miss Burgess Fern came up, sat in the chair beside her sister, and, after listening a moment, said, “I think the secret of Rhoda’s temperament is the simple fact that she doesn’t need others, the way most of us do. She is such a self-sufficient little girl! Never in all my life have I seen anybody so completely all-of-one-piece!

The painter was pleased with her work. She had managed to catch her sitter's characteristic expression—the look of a good child, a wondering sort of look, innocent and serious. It was humility, thought Rhoda. That was the keynote of Bel's character. Rhoda had never prized this virtue—she had thought it overrated—but now she realised that she had been mistaken. Humility was not just an absence of pride; it was not a negative virtue; it was a definite 'fruit of the spirit.' False humility was horrible, of course (vide Uriah Heap), but real humility, growing from within, was beautiful.

Leroy unscrewed the hose from its faucet and prepared to put it away in the basement, thinking: Nobody can put nothing over on Rhoda, I’ll say that much for her. And nobody can put nothing over on me, neither. I guess Rhoda and me are just alike. But in this he was mistaken, as we shall see in time, for Rhoda was able to put into action the things that he could only turn over in his mind as fantasies.

Ball walked by Moore, then backtracked a few seconds later, looked her in the eye, and said, “You’re very good,” before she left. Moore would think of that whenever she felt unsure of herself.

I am very grateful, Source of Strength, when You show me the reasons I need to do the right thing. —Rhoda Blecker

IT seems a stupid hackneyed sort of thing to say—a thing whose point by much wear is worn out, a thing which everybody says, and consequently which it is below my dignity to say—that the half-hour after dinner, when ladies, according to English manners, are left to themselves, is not an enjoyable period; but though it is hackneyed, it is true—at least I fancy so, from what I can gather. To see the evil in its worst shape, read Corinne’s account of the after-dinner female séances at Lord Edgermont’s castle of dulness.[69] It is certainly a true saying when the members of the society are very few and know each other very slightly, and, moreover, have not the smallest desire to know each other any better. Such

Kate stood by that low bed, looking down earnestly on its occupant—that occupant that was now a person, and soon would be—O, fearful metamorphosis!—but a thing,—why was it that the recollection of her own mother flashed so arrow-swift, so lightning-bright, across her? What possible resemblance could there be found between this poor plebeian, with the swollen, debased features, with the coarse, weather-stained, care-wrinkled skin, and her mother, with her patient, saintly face and spirit eyes? What resemblance indeed! Why this, just this one, which struck Kate through and through: she had seen on both the stamp of the valley of the shadow of death.[301] There is that much resemblance between us all. We acknowledge it in words; but we do not often feel it to our heart’s core; do not realise how near of kin that ineradicable stain of mortality makes us all. The

Generation after generation of short-spanned living creatures has ripened and rotted, they looking calmly on, superior in their unwithering amaranthine bloom—generation after generation has gaped open-mouthed, awed by their solemn presence—generation after generation will so gaze and stare until the world is overrun with a new deluge of barbarians from the far West, or till it comes to its final ending. That happy man, to whose deathless glory it was granted to fashion the Laocoon, must have had in his mind to excite the envy and shame of puny, feeble after-ages, long after he and his chisel should be dust together; showing them what manner of men there were in the old time, in blue-skied templed Hellas.[390] But then, again, one feels inclined—perhaps from aversion to acknowledge that we have degenerated—to doubt whether those god-faces and Titan-frames[391] could have been copied from any mere flesh-and-blood creature that, while in life, drudged away on the earth and had material blood flowing in his veins. Could such stainless triumphant beauty and might have been ever found in our world, where perfection in anything is proverbially unattainable? Rather must it have been some divine afflatus[392] breathed into the fashioner’s soul, speaking to him of a flawlessness of outward build such as had never

And yet, despite all my reasoning to the contrary, I feel that the father and sons in the Laocoon are men and not gods. In their suffering we recognise their humanity. That is a badge that all the bond-servants of the flesh wear without exception; there is no mistaking it. In the dignity of their eternal agony we recognise their brotherhood to ourselves. At

Life certainly was not so jocund a thing to her as to most young women. She had had one or two very hard blows—blows that had knocked her down so much that she could not hope ever to stand up again quite so upright and firm as she had done before; and though no one was giving her blows now, yet the days somehow lagged, and she did not seem to care much whether it were even or morning, noon or night.

Now for the stuff that he was made of inside, which it required more intimate knowledge to give an opinion of. Not a good man at all. A bad man, if tried by a high standard—that standard we shall all be tried by at last; measured and weighed by the world’s weights and measures, a good fellow enough. O, the immeasurable distance between a good man and a good fellow! A dissipated, self-indulgent man, like all the other men in his set. One who walked along life’s pathway with his eyes glued to the crumbling dust-heaps of the earth, instead of raised in glad expectancy and awed contemplation to those skyey chambers, built all of pure, untarnished gold, which are waiting for us above the sun and the moon and the stars. He might hug himself with the satisfactory reflection that, during the six lustres[60] of his existence, he had not done one atom of good to any human being, but, on the contrary, had done a good deal of harm:

Man is so entirely dependent on man—so much a part, so little a whole—that I do not believe he is intended to be so self-sufficing and self-contained, so like a snail in his portable house, as some folks say. I think he is intended to take a little interest in his neighbours’ concerns:

Since this time yesterday she had made the pleasing discovery that she was fast falling in love violently, and as it now appeared unrequitedly, with a man her superior in station, and in every respect unlikely to prove a satisfactory object for that passion which forms the main plot of a woman’s life, and is only a small secondary byplay in a man’s. Yes, the play of her life had begun, and whether it was to be a tragedy or a comedy who could tell?[99] Probably, neither; most people’s are neither the one nor the other,—too prosaically free from any great emotions or grand situations for tragedy, too triste[100] and serious for comedy. To me most people’s lives seem like melodramas without a dénouement. The first three or four acts are played, and while we are waiting for the fifth, which is to be the key to all the others, which is to explain all that is unaccountable, and reconcile all incongruities, lo, the curtain drops! The fifth is played in some other world, and we must suspend our curiosity till we get there. A

1864 Broughton’s sister Eleanor marries William Charles Newcome; Broughton makes her home with them at Upper Eyarth in Denbyshire. She shows her uncle by marriage, J. S. Le Fanu, the manuscript of Not Wisely, but Too Well. 1865-66

Concrete goals give purpose and meaning to our lives and obstruct our tendency to obsess about what it making us angry.

Nate got out of the car and was rather surprised to see his father smile at Rhoda. That was a quick turnaround. She was like some sort of horse whisperer but with grumpy old farmers instead

Nate was back within a few minutes and sat in the armchair on the other side of the fireplace to his father, Rhoda had already seated herself on the sofa, while DS Shepherd remained standing. She had to withhold a smile at the thought they looked as if they were on the set of an Agatha Christie mystery, and the policeman was just about to reveal the name of the killer. They only needed a gardener, a maid and an eccentric aunt to complete the cast

There is nothing like a good dependable leaf.

I look back on that May morning, and on myself at my pretty play‐work, as Eve must have looked back upon the pastimes of Paradise. I am not separated from that time by any great crime, as she was from the period of her happiness; but I think the yearning regret that filled the universal mother's bosom for the lotos‐scented airs that breathed about the banks of those mystic eastern rivers, was akin to the eager longing (never to be gratified now) with which I inhale in fancy the rough western breezes blowing round old Lestrange. I suppose it rained there in those days; I suppose it snowed, and was foggy, and cold, and dreary there in those days as much as other places—perhaps more; but I cannot realize that now. To me it seems as if those gnarled old trees were always crowned with a glory of green leaves; as if those walls were always sunlit; as if the pinks and the sweet peas and the larkspurs flowered there all the year round. I did not think myself particularly happy in those days. That is the worst of this life—one never tastes its sweets while they are in one's mouth; it is only when they are gone, and we are chewing the bitters, and making wry faces over them, that we recognise them for what they were.

Sighs are the gales that blow us to heaven, I sometimes think; they breathe unconscious weariness of the “here,” and longing for the “there.

Oh,” said Rhoda, a little taken aback. “Because it must. It must be wonderful just to sit down and write off a whole book.” “It doesn’t happen exactly like that,” said Mrs. Oliver. “One actually has to think, you know. And thinking is always a bore. And you have to plan things. And then one gets stuck every now and then, and you feel you’ll never get out of the mess—but you do! Writing’s not particularly enjoyable. It’s hard work like everything else.

You fell in love in the South, Millie Keith.' 'Gordon, how did you...? Wait! Rhoda Jane could have told you that!' 'Could have, but she didn't. And nobody needs to tell me what it means that you're here and he is not.' Gordon looked across the river where the sun was sinking behind the hills like a burnished copper coin. 'If he breaks your heart, you just remember - there's almost nothing I can't fix.' 'He can't break it, Gordon,' Millie said. 'Bruise it perhaps, but not break it. My heart belongs to Jesus.' 'Mine, too,' Gordon said, smiling. 'Mine, too,' he laughed. 'I have to say, though, that it's occasionally taken a pounding.

she heard Mrs. Brummidge hiss at Rhoda, “Unseemly!” with the same tone of scandal she might have used had she been saying “Strumpet!” or “Baptist!

Shoulder the Sky is another story about Mureth Farm and Drumburly and the people who live there; it continues the theme of Vittoria Cottage and Music in the Hills but it is a complete novel in itself. The three books are merely strung together by the story of James and Rhoda and their friends. Mureth and Drumburly are not real places in the geographical sense of the word. There is no metalled road that leads to Drumburly (the best road to take is an easy chair before the fire on a winter’s evening), but the picture represented is artistically true of the Scottish Border Country; of the rolling hills, the rivers and the burns, of the storms and the sunshine. So, in one sense, Drumburly is real and in another it is imaginary — and the same is true of the characters in the story; they are not real individuals and yet they are true to life. To me they are real and human for I have been living amongst them and sharing their joys and sorrows for months on end. Now the time has come for me to leave Drumburly and say good-bye. D. E. STEVENSON 

Loneliness is inside a person,” replied Sutherland. “It is possible to be lonely in a big city. If a person is contented and has enough work to do he will not feel lonely amongst the hills … but it is a wee bit out of the way and would not do for a man with young children who were attending school. All the same it is a solid little house and comfortable. If you are going in that direction Mistress Sutherland would be pleased to give you a cup of tea.” Rhoda

The Adventures of Dickson McCunn, Adam Bede, Eric or Little by Little, these and many others, old and new, good bad and indifferent were grist to Duggie’s mill. He found a novel by Rhoda Broughton entitled Not Wisely But Too Well and read it all through. He read an abridged version of Robinson Crusoe, and Under Two Flags and Coral Island with equal concentration. He read Little Women and Wuthering Heights. Cheyney he found difficult, for the people seemed to speak an unfamiliar language, but he struggled on manfully all the same. Needless

Everything is better with gravy. Life is better with gravy. Rhoda

Rhoda was seldom shocked but this shocked her. It was not only the words but the casual scornful tone in which they were uttered and, perhaps most of all, the unkindness that shocked her. Rhoda had lived in London on her own and, mixing with all sorts and conditions of people, had heard a good many arguments for and against the existence of an after life; but although the arguments had been closely reasoned and occasionally had led to fierce altercations, this cold-hearted bitterness was a thousand times worse. “That comforts you, doesn’t it, Anna?” repeated Mr. Heddle, insisting upon an answer to his question. “Yes — it does — really,” said Miss Heddle in a low voice. “Why shouldn’t it?” demanded Rhoda truculently. “Because it’s false comfort,” replied Mr. Heddle turning and looking at Rhoda with a baleful eye. “And because people like Anna who comfort themselves with false hopes are cowards at heart. They can’t face up to this life so they bolster themselves up with the idea that there will be a better one. I suppose you believe in a Heaven, Above the Bright Blue Sky?” “Yes,” replied Rhoda with spirit. “Have you never looked through a telescope?” asked Mr. Heddle in a patient voice, such as one might use to a moron. “At night a telescope reveals stars which are so far off that the light from them takes millions of years to reach this earth. Where is your Heaven?” “It’s somewhere,” Rhoda said. “I’m quite sure of that in spite of your telescope. When I was a child I didn’t know where Australia was. Now I know where it is. Someday, when I’ve grown up a bit more, I shall know where Heaven is.” “It’s

history n. Discipline that, in reminding us that the world existed before we did, creates identity malfunction and is therefore banned from schools along with foreign languages, the province of obstinate and eccentric foreigners. Those who worry that, if we do not study history, we are doomed to repeat it need not be concerned. Everyone, whether or not he studies history, is doomed to repeat history. hobby