The Wheels of Chance quotes

But real literature, as distinguished from anecdote, does not concern itself with superficial appearances alone.

Literature is revelation. Modern literature is indecorous revelation.

It is the duty of the earnest author to tell you what you would not have seen—even at the cost of some blushes.

and so remarkable is the psychology of cycling, that he rode all the straighter and easier because the emotions the heath-keeper had aroused relieved his mind of the constant expectation of collapse that had previously unnerved him.

To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair⁠—chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

Now you may perhaps imagine that as he rode on, his feelings towards the heath-keeper were either vindictive or remorseful—vindictive for the aggravation or remorseful for his own injudicious display of ill temper. As a matter of fact, they were nothing of the sort.

And all unseen by you a host of heaven-sent fatuities swathes him about, even, maybe, as they swathe you about.

Many men have never seen their own profiles or the backs of their heads, and for the back of your own mind no mirror has been invented.

They swathe him about so thickly that the pricks of fate scarce penetrate to him, or become but a pleasant titillation. And so, indeed, it is with all of us who go on living.

They swathe him about so thickly that the pricks of fate scarce penetrate to him, or become but a pleasant titillation. And so, indeed, it is with all of us who go on living.

Self-deception is the anaesthetic of life, while God is carving out our beings.

But to return from this general vivisection to Mr. Hoopdriver’s imaginings. You see now how external our view has been; we have had but the slightest transitory glimpses of the drama within, of how the things looked in the magic mirror of Mr. Hoopdriver’s mind.

There was this malefactor, and his victim, and it had fallen on Mr. Hoopdriver to take a hand in the game. He was married. Did she know he was married? Never for a moment did a thought of evil concerning her cross Hoopdriver’s mind.

Simpleminded people see questions of morals so much better than superior persons⁠—who have read and thought themselves complex to impotence.

He had heard her voice, seen the frank light in her eyes, and she had been weeping—that sufficed. The rights of the case he hadn’t properly grasped. But he would. And that smirking—well, swine was the mildest for him.

Now the road turned westward, and she was a dark grey outline against the shimmer of the moon; and now they faced northwards, and the soft cold light passed caressingly over her hair and touched her brow and cheek.

There is a magic quality in moonshine; it touches all that is sweet and beautiful, and the rest of the night is hidden.

It has created the fairies, whom the sunlight kills, and fairyland rises again in our hearts at the sight of it, the voices of the filmy route, and their faint, soul-piercing melodies.

“I am entirely at your service. I will help you with all my power.”

“I have lost an Illusion and found a Knight-errant.”

She spoke of Bechamel as the Illusion.

Increasing rivalry and antagonism had sprung up between them, until they could engender quite a vivid hatred from a dropped hairpin or the cutting of a book with a sharpened knife.

There is very little deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it shows a different nature.

And when the disaster came, Mrs. Milton’s remorse for their gradual loss of sympathy and her share in the losing of it, was genuine enough.

“I should have screamed and run away.”

“There’s some things you can’t run away from,” said Mr. Hoopdriver. “To run would have been Death.”

“I don’t think I ever met a lion-killer before,” she remarked, evidently with a heightened opinion of him.

The remark, I must add, implicated Mr. Hoopdriver. It indicated an entire disbelief in his social standing. At a blow, it shattered all the gorgeous imaginative fabric his mind had been rejoicing in. All that foolish happiness vanished like a dream.

And there was nothing to show for it, as there is nothing to show for any spiteful remark that has ever been made.

Perhaps the man who said the thing had a gleam of satisfaction at the idea of taking a complacent-looking fool down a peg, but it is just as possible he did not know at the time that his stray shot had hit.

He said this because he could think of nothing else to say, and stuck out his elbows truculently to hide the sinking of his heart.

It is curious how situations run away with us.

“ ’Ullo, Charlie!” said the little man, and “My eye!” said the owner of the chins. “You’re going to wipe your boots on ’im?” said the fair young man, in a tone of mild surprise.

Jessie’s feelings for her stepmother’s household at Surbiton amounted to an active detestation.

There are no graver or more solemn women in the world than these clever girls whose scholastic advancement has retarded their feminine coquetry.

In spite of the advanced tone of “Thomas Plantagenet’s” antimarital novel, Jessie had speedily seen through that amiable woman’s amiable defences. The variety of pose necessitated by the corps of “Men” annoyed her to an altogether unreasonable degree.

All through the small hours of Monday he reviewed the tale of his falsehoods, and when he tried to turn his mind from that, the financial problem suddenly rose upon him. He heard two o’clock strike, and three.

It is odd how unhappy some of us are at times, when we are at our happiest.

“Good morning, Madam,” said Hoopdriver, as Jessie came into the breakfast room of the Golden Pheasant on Monday morning, and he smiled, bowed, rubbed his hands together, and pulled out a chair for her, and rubbed his hands again.

“Do what?” said Jessie, looking up in surprise over the coffee pot. She was just beginning her scrambled egg.

“Miss Milton⁠—I’m a liar.”

He put his head on one side and regarded her with a frown of tremendous resolution. Then in measured accents, and moving his head slowly from side to side, he announced, “Ay’m a deraper.”

“I wanted to learn,” said Jessie.

“You wanted to learn. May you never have anything to unlearn.”

“Ah!” from Mrs. Milton, very sadly.

“The point is,” said Mrs. Milton, on her defence, “that in my books—”

“All I want to do,” said Jessie, “is to go about freely by myself. Girls do so in America. Why not here?”

“Social conditions are entirely different in America,” said Miss Mergle. “Here we respect Class Distinctions.”