The Portent quotes

The sheep ate over it, and no doubt found it good; I bounded and climbed all over it, and thought it a kingdom.

From my very childhood, I had rejoiced in being alone.

The sense of room about me had been one of my greatest delights.

He was both gloomy and passionate. Prone to anger, he had never been known to forgive. Debarred from anything on which he had set his heart, he would have gone mad with longing if he had not gone mad with rage.

His soul was like the night around us now, dark, and sultry, and silent, but lighted up by the red levin of wrath and torn by the bellowings of thunder-passion.

He must have his will: hell might have his soul.

“Whether anyone saw what I am about to relate, or whether it was put together afterwards, I cannot tell.

The story is like an old tree⁠—so old that it has lost the marks of its growth.

But this is how my grandmother told it to me.—An evil chance led him in the right direction. The lovers, startled by the sound of the approaching horse, parted in opposite directions along a narrow mountain-path on the edge of the ravine.

I had dressed and completed my preparations long before I heard the steps of the servant who came to call me.

What a wonderful thing waking is!

The time of the ghostly moonshine passes by, and the great positive sunlight comes. A man who dreams, and knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is;

Seated at table, I had leisure to make my observations upon them all; but most of my glances found their way to the lady who, twice that day, had affected me like an apparition.

What is time, but the airy ocean in which ghosts come and go!

She was about twenty years of age; rather above the middle height, and rather slight in form; her complexion white rather than pale, her face being only less white than the deep marbly whiteness of her arms.

She was about twenty years of age; rather above the middle height, and rather slight in form; her complexion white rather than pale, her face being only less white than the deep marbly whiteness of her arms.

Her eyes were large, and full of liquid night⁠—a night throbbing with the light of invisible stars.

Her hair seemed raven-black, and in quantity profuse. The expression of her face, however, generally partook more of vagueness than any other characteristic. Lady Hilton called her Lady Alice; and she never addressed Lady Hilton but in the same ceremonious style.

several cupboards in the wall, and one or two doors, apparently of closets, had especially attracted my attention. Strange was its look as I entered—as of a room hollowed out of the past, for a memorial of dead times.

The fire had sunk low, and lay smouldering beneath the white ashes, like the life of the world beneath the snow, or the heart of a man beneath cold and grey thoughts.

I lighted the candles which stood upon the table, but the room, instead of being brightened looked blacker than before, for the light revealed its essential blackness.

Like a weakly constitution, it required keeping up, and his lordship could not be said to neglect it; for he seemed to find his principal employment in administering continuous doses of obsequiousness to his own pride.

His rank, like a coat made for some large ancestor, hung loose upon him: he was always trying to persuade himself that it was an excellent fit, but ever with an unacknowledged misgiving.

This misgiving might have done him good, had he not met it with renewed efforts at looking that which he feared he was not. Yet this man was capable of the utmost persistency in carrying out any scheme he had once devised.

She did not even show any interest in the fact that her daughter, Lady Lucy, had joined her brothers in the schoolroom. I had an uncomfortable feeling that the latter was like her mother, and was not to be trusted.

Self-love is the foulest of all foul feeders, and will defile that it may devour.

But I must not anticipate.

Now I was in my element. I never had been by any means a bookworm; but the very outside of a book had a charm to me.

It was a kind of sacrament⁠—an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; as, indeed, what on God’s earth is not?

So I set to work amongst the books, and soon became familiar with many titles at least, which had been perfectly unknown to me before.

Did the ghostly rider still haunt the place? or, if he did, should I hear again that sound of coming woe? Whether or not, I defied him.

I would not be turned from my desire to see the old place by any fear of a ghostly marauder

, whom I should be only too glad to encounter, if there were the smallest chance of coming off with the victory.

… first on which I ventured to walk into the fields alone, I was delighted with the multitude of the daisies peeping from the grass everywhere—the first attempts of the earth, become conscious of blindness, to open eyes, and see what was about and above her.

Everything is wonderful after the resurrection from illness.

It is a resurrection of all nature. But somehow or other I was not satisfied with the daisies. They did not seem to me so lovely as the daisies I used to see when I was a child.

I have lived upon it when, I daresay, you did not care whether I was alive or dead. But that was all one to my love. When you leave me now, I shall not care much. My thoughts will only return to their old ways.

I think the sight of the eyes is sometimes an intrusion between the heart and its love.

”

After I had floated, as it were, upon the waves of memory for some time, I suddenly glanced behind me and around the room, and a new and strange experience dawned upon me.

Time became to my consciousness what some metaphysicians say it is in itself⁠—only a form of human thought.

For the Past had returned and had become the Present. I could not be sure that the Past had passed, that I had not been dreaming through the whole series of years and adventures, upon which I was able to look back.

Let them say what they would of the meanness and wickedness of gaining such access to, and using such power over, the insane—she was mine, and as safe with me as with her mother.

There is a love that tears and destroys; and there is a love that enfolds and saves.

I hated mesmerism and its vulgar impertinences;

She went, and I returned to my den. There I lay and thought. Had she ever been insane at all? I doubted it. A kind of mental sleep or stupor had come upon her—nothing more.

True it might be allied to madness; but is there a strong emotion that man or woman experiences that is not allied to madness?

Still her mind was not clear enough to reflect the past. But if she never recalled that entirely, not the less were her love and tenderness—all womanliness—entire in her.