The Bridge of San Luis Rey quotes

St. Louis of France himself protected it, by his name and by the little mud church on the further side.

The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break.

The moment a Peruvian heard of the accident he signed himself and made a mental calculation as to how recently he had crossed by it and how soon he had intended crossing by it again. People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering;

There was a great service in the Cathedral. The bodies of the victims were approximately collected and approximately separated from one another, and there was great searching of hearts in the beautiful city of Lima.

Servant girls returned bracelets which they had stolen from their mistresses, and usurers harangued their wives angrily, in defense of usury.

Yet it was rather strange that this event should have so impressed the Limeans, for in that country those catastrophes which lawyers shockingly call the “acts of God” were more than usually frequent. Tidal waves were continually washing away cities;

“Why did this happen to those five?” If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.

And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons that moment falling through the air, and to surprise the reason of their taking off.

It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and he had long intended putting it there.

What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory. Oh, there had never been any lack of specimens; any number of his charges had met calamity—spiders had stung them; their lungs had been touched;

Yet for all his diligence, Brother Juniper never knew the central passion of Doña María’s life; nor of Uncle Pio’s, not even of Esteban’s.

And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed …

nor of Uncle Pio’s, not even of Esteban’s. And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

the Conde delighted in her letters, but he thought that when he had enjoyed the style he had extracted all their richness and intention, missing (as most readers do) the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart.

Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds, and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day’s routine to them.

This idea had so often visited her that one day she wrote it into a letter and her daughter scolded her for an introspective and for making a cult of sorrow.

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song.

They picked fruit. They were ferrymen. And always they were silent. Their sombre faces took on from these labors a male and gypsy cast. Their hair was seldom cut and under the dark mat their eyes looked up suddenly surprised and a little sullen.

All the world was remote and strange and hostile except one’s brother.

But at last the first shadow fell across this unity and the shadow was cast by the love of women.

They had returned to the city and resumed the copying of parts for the theatre. One night the manager, foreseeing a thinning house, gave them a free admission. The boys did not like what they found there.

Even speech was for them a debased form of silence, how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.

All those allusions to honour, reputation, and the flame of love, all the metaphors about birds, Achilles and the jewels of Ceylon were fatiguing.

But the life that Esteban was leading had been full enough for him. There was no room in his imagination for a new loyalty, not because his heart was less large than Manuel’s, but because it was of a simpler texture.

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

So Esteban sat up in their room by a guttering candle, his knuckles between his teeth, and wondered why Manuel was so changed and why the whole meaning had gone out of their life.

and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some Heaven whither Calderón had preceded them.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.

With the passing of time Camila lost some of this absorption in her art. A certain intermittent contempt for acting made her negligent. It was due to the poverty of interest in women’s roles throughout Spanish classical drama.

For this distinction he cultivated his own definition of love that was like no other and that had gathered all its bitterness and pride from his odd life.

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

There was (he believed) a great repertory of errors mercifully impossible to human beings who had recovered from this illness.

Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.

Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

As her friends continued in their efforts to draw her again into society she grew more and more angry and dispatched insulting messages to the city. It was said for a time that she was retiring into religion.

he gazed for an hour upon the great clouds of pearl that hang forever upon the horizon of that sea, and extracted from their beauty a resignation that he did not permit his reason to examine.

The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.

But there was another story of the master of San Martín (not so subversive, this one) that probably gave to Brother Juniper the hint for his procedure after the fall of the bridge of San Luis Rey.

The bookseller of the town reported that she was one of the three most cultivated persons in Lima. Her farmer’s wife declared that she was absentminded, but compact of goodness.

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

Brother Juniper found that there was least to be learned from those who had been most closely associated with the subjects of his inquiry.

Her allusions to her son were few and conceded with pain. They closed the interview abruptly. The Captain Alvarado told what he could of Esteban and of Uncle Pio.

Those who know most in this realm venture least.

I shall spare you Brother Juniper’s generalizations. They are always with us. He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven.

Her lips were white. Her head brushed the Abbess’s knee: “Mother, what shall I do? I am all alone. I have nothing in the world. I love them. What shall I do?”

The Abbess looked at her closely.

“My daughter, it is warm here. Let us go into the garden. You can rest there.” She made a sign to a girl in the cloister to bring some water. She continued talking mechanically to Camila.