Thursday, November 29, 2007

Villette(3) by Charlotte Bronte

...that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh.

The expression clothing that profile was agreeable...

...sonorous, brass-lunged choruses...

...in your cheek, which the blood has forsaken.

...the pupils, rampant in the licence of evening recreation, were counterfeiting a miniature chaos.

...for the letters from incessant perusal were losing all sap and significance...

The sky, relieved of its avalanche, lay naked and pale.

The longer we live, the more our experience widens; the less prone are we to judge our neighbor's conduct, to question the world's wisdom...

Her personal appearance was far from destitute of advantages.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Villette(2) by Charlotte Bronte

Some people's movements provoke the soul by their loose awkwardness...

...his destitution of purse.

...the weather and rooms being too hot to give substantial fabrics suffrance...

I read your skull that night you came...

When my tongue once got free, and my voice took its true pitch, and found its natural tone...

...he fumed like a bottled storm.

...a want of companionship maintained in my soul the cravings of a most deadly famine.

...but this duty had become to him a sort of form: he went through it with the phlegm of custom.

I said I was perishing for a word of advice or an accent of comfort.

It was cold, and pierced me to the vitals.

I saw in his countenance a teeming plenitude of comment, question and interest...

I have done nothing wrong: my life has not been active enough for any dark deed, either of romance or reality...

...my sympathy desired to keep its cornucopia replenished and ready for outpouring.











Villette by Charlotte Bronte

...it was a scene of feeling too brimful...

...to be in a trance of content.

...to sever the thread of an existence so long fretted by affliction.

...(the room did not boast a sofa).

...they shook my philosophy more than did the night...

Black was the river as a torrent of ink...

...yet amidst all these deadening influences, my fancy budded fresh...

...they were very plebeian in soul.

...I found myself an object of study: she held me under her eye...

...polishing my faculties and whetting them to a keen edge with constant use.

...on the edge of a moral volcano that rumbled under my feet...

...I was sitting on the hidden seat reclaimed from fungi and mould...

..the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live.