The Return quotes

He was, he supposed, rather a dull creature—at least people seemed to think so—and he seldom felt at ease even with his own small facetiousness. Besides, just that kind of question was getting very common.

Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever⁠—even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body.

He turned languidly to the small cross-shaped stone on the other side:

They might, you know,” he added confidentially, raising the ferrule of his umbrella, “they might have stuck a stake through you, and buried you at the crossroads.” And again, a feeling of ennui, a faint disgust at his poor little witticism, clouded over his mind.

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

“ ‘Here lie ye bones of one, Nicholas Sabathier,’ ” he began murmuring again—“merely bones, mind you; brains and heart are quite another story. And it’s pretty certain the fellow had some kind of brains. Besides, poor devil! he killed himself.

He was still, it seemed, keenly sane. That he would discover for certain when Sheila returned. Terror, rage, horror had fallen back. If only he felt ill, or was in pain: he would have rejoiced at it.

He was simply caught in some unheard-of snare⁠—caught, how? when? where? by whom?

“Yes, a suicide; that’s why our Christian countrymen have buried him outside of the fold.

Dead or alive, they try to keep the wolf out.

”

What more likely, more inevitable than that such a thing should leave its scar, its cloud, its masking shadow?—call it what you will.

A smile can turn a face we dread into a face we’d die for.

Some experience, which would be nothing but a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about—one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of—has put him temporarily at the world’s mercy.

“No, that’s the best of it; nobody ever does. We are just buried alive. We have lived here for years, and scarcely know a soul—not even our own, perhaps. Why on earth should one?

Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.

”

“No, that’s the best of it; nobody ever does.

We are just buried alive.

We have lived here for years, and scarcely know a soul—not even our own, perhaps. Why on earth should one? Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.”

“Insane!” There was a genuinely amused astonishment in the echo. “You were lucidity itself. Besides—well, honestly, if I may venture,

I don’t put very much truck in what one calls one’s sanity: except, of course, as a bond of respectability and a means of livelihood.

”

“I wish,” said Sheila almost pathetically, and yet with a faint quaver of resignation, “

I wish it could be said that the man of the house sometimes has the heart.

Think it over, Arthur!”

It’s perfectly natural. Where should we poor old busybodies be else.

Peace on earth we bring, and it’s mainly between husband and wife.

”

You’ve got this almost intolerable burden to bear; it’s come like a thief in the night; but bear it you must, and alone!

They say death’s a going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life’s a long undressing.

We came in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and watch the world fade.

“Yet I suppose even that is not a very rare character?” Mr. Bethany peered up from the dingy book at his ingenuous questioner. “I should say decidedly that the fellow was a very rare character, so long as by rare you don’t mean good.

It’s one of the dullest stupidities of the present day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he’s different from the rest of us.

Once a man strays out of the common herd, he’s more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

It’s one of the dullest stupidities of the present day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he’s different from the rest of us.

Once a man strays out of the common herd, he’s more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

From what I can gather in just these few pages this Sabathier appears to have been an amorous, adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed.

What are we all if we only realized it?

We talk of dignity and propriety, and we are like so many children playing with knucklebones in a giant’s scullery.

Come along, he will, some suppertime, for us, each in turn—and how many even will so much as look up from their play to wave us goodbye? that’s what I mean—the plot of silence we are all in.

If you had only heard my sister scolding me, railing at me for putting such ideas into your jangled head! They don’t affect me one iota. I have, I suppose, what is usually called imagination; which merely means that

I can sup with the devil, spoon for spoon, and could sleep in Bluebeard’s linen-closet without turning a hair.

You, if I am not very much mistaken, are not much troubled with that very unprofitable quality, and so, I suppose, when a crooked and bizarre fancy does edge into your mind it roots there.”

It’s most of it false and most of it useless. We all surely must take what comes in this topsy-turvy world. I believe in saying out:—that the more one thinks about life the worse it becomes.

There are only two kinds of happiness in this world⁠—a wooden post’s and Prometheus’s.

And who ever heard of anyone having the impudence to be kind to Prometheus? As for a miserable ‘medium’ like me, not quite a post and leagues and leagues from even envying a Prometheus, she’s better for the powder without the jam.

“You see, Lawford, the very term is little else than double Dutch to me. As a matter of fact Grisel sends all my hush-money to the horrible people that do the cleaning up, as it were. I can’t catch their drift.

Government to me is merely the spectacle of the clever, or the specious, managing the dull.

It deals merely with the physical, and just the fringe of consciousness. I am not joking. I think I follow you.