Zuleika Dobson quotes

She had the air of the born unpacker—swift and firm, yet withal tender. Scarce had her arms been laden but their loads were lying lightly between shelves or tightly in drawers. To calculate, catch, distribute, seemed in her but a single process.

She was one of those who are born to make chaos cosmic.

Insomuch that ere the loud chapel-clock tolled another hour all the trunks had been sent empty away. The carpet was unflecked by any scrap of silver-paper. From the mantelpiece, photographs of Zuleika surveyed the room with a possessive air.

There was ennui, and there was wistfulness, in her gaze. Yet one would have guessed these things to be transient—to be no more than the little shadows that sometimes pass between a bright mirror and the brightness it reflects.

Zuleika was not strictly beautiful.

Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow.

He would not cease to produce the barber’s-pole from his mouth. To the indifferent winds he would still speak his patter, and even in the last throes of starvation would not eat his live rabbit or his goldfish.

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man’s footprint.

She was, indeed, far too human a creature to care much for art. I do not say that she took her work lightly. She thought she had genius, and she liked to be told that this was so.

“You know the meaning of the term ‘effective occupation’? Having marched in, how could you have held your position, unless”—

“Oh, a man doesn’t necessarily drive a woman away because he isn’t in love with her.”

“Yet that was what you thought I had done to you last night.”

“Then what,” cried the Duke, standing over her, “what is your reply?”

Said Zuleika, looking up at him, “My reply is that I think you are an awful snob.”

The Duke turned on his heel, and strode to the other end of the room. There he stood for some moments, his back to Zuleika.

the good is oft interred with their bones.” At any rate, the sinner has a better chance than the saint of being hereafter remembered. We, in whom original sin preponderates, find him easier to understand. He is near to us, clear to us.

The saint is remote, dim. A very great saint may, of course, be remembered through some sheer force of originality in him

; and then the very mystery that involves him for us makes him the harder to forget: he haunts us the more surely because we shall never understand him. But the ordinary saints grow faint to posterity;

What better could he ask than to die for his love? Poor indeed seemed to him now the sacrament of marriage beside the sacrament of death. Death was incomparably the greater, the finer soul.

Death was the one true bridal.

He flung back his head, spread wide his arms, quickened his pace almost to running speed. Ah, he would win his bride before the setting of the sun. He knew not by what means he would win her.

No beggar, no burglar, had ever been rebuffed by this catholic beast. But he drew the line at Zuleika.

Seldom is even a fierce bulldog heard to growl. Yet Corker growled at Zuleika.

Through untold centuries of the future it would stand thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loth to regard his doom as trivial.

Aye, by all minerals we are mocked.

Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the railed pathway to Christ Church meadow, were all a-swaying and a-nodding to the Duke as he passed by. “Adieu, adieu, your Grace,” they were whispering.

“Ah no, no; not in retrospect. I remain their ideal, and all that, of course. They cherish the thought of me. They see the world in terms of me.

But I am an inspiration, not an obsession; a glow, not a blight.

”

They held that the future was theirs, a glorious asset, far more glorious than the past. But a theory, as the Duke saw, is one thing, an emotion another.

It is so much easier to covet what one hasn’t than to revel in what one has.

Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn’t. The future doesn’t exist. The past does. For, whereas all men can learn, the gift of prophecy has died out.

“As I feared,” said the Duke, knowing not that if a hand had been held up he would have taken it as a personal insult.

No man really in love can forgive another for not sharing his ardour.

His jealousy for himself when his beloved prefers another man is hardly a stronger passion than his jealousy for her when she is not preferred to all other women.

They nodded. “To hear me play, or to see Miss Dobson?” There was a murmur of “Both—both.” “And you would all of you, like Marraby, wish to be presented to this lady?” Their eyes dilated. “That way happiness lies, think you?”

“Oh, happiness be hanged!” said Marraby.

To the Duke this seemed a profoundly sane remark—an epitome of his own sentiments. But what was right for himself was not right for all. He believed in convention as the best way for average mankind.

And now, as the rest saw Zuleika yet again at close quarters, and verified their remembrance of her, the half-formed desire in them to die too was hardened to a vow.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost—he becomes just an unit in unreason.

The moon, like a gardenia in the night’s buttonhole—but no! why should a writer never be able to mention the moon without likening her to something else—usually something to which she bears not the faintest resemblance? …

The moon, looking like nothing whatsoever but herself, was engaged in her old and futile endeavour to mark the hours correctly on the sundial at the centre of the lawn.

Never, except once, late one night in the eighteenth century, when the toper who was Sub-Warden had spent an hour in trying to set his watch here, had she received the slightest encouragement. Still she wanly persisted.

The Warden was just awake enough to notice the sea of undergraduates. Suspecting some breach of College discipline, he retired hastily to his own quarters, for fear his dignity might be somehow compromised.

Was there ever, I wonder, an historian so pure as not to have wished just once to fob off on his readers just one bright fable for effect?

I find myself sorely tempted to tell you that on Zuleika, as her entertainment drew to a close, the spirit of the higher thaumaturgy descended like a flame and found in her a worthy agent. Specious Apollyon whispers to me, “Where would be the harm?

As he disappeared into the porch, Zuleika turned to the Duke. “You were splendid,” she said softly. He knew that very well.

Does the stag in his hour of victory need a diploma from the hind?

Holding in his hands the malachite casket that was the symbol of his triumph, the Duke smiled dictatorially at his darling. He came near to thinking of her as a chattel. Then with a pang he remembered his abject devotion to her.

She saw through his disguise immediately, and, with great courage and independence, bade him begone. Rebuffed, he was not deflected. Indeed it would seem that Clio’s high spirit did but sharpen his desire.

Hardly a day passed but he appeared in what he hoped would be the irresistible form⁠—a recently discovered fragment of Polybius, an advance copy of the forthcoming issue of The Historical Review, the notebook of Professor Carl Vöertschlaffen⁠ ⁠…

One day, all-prying Hermes told him of Clio’s secret addiction to novel-reading. Thenceforth, year in, year out, it was in the form of fiction that Zeus wooed her.

They have been no more than the sighs of men gazing at what other men had left behind them; faint, impossible appeals to the god of retrogression, uttered for their own sake and ritual, rather than with any intent that they should be heard.

Oxford, that lotus-land, saps the willpower, the power of action.

But, in doing so, it clarifies the mind, makes larger the vision, gives, above all, that playful and caressing suavity of manner which comes of a conviction that nothing matters, except ideas, and that not even ideas are worth dying for, inasmuch as the ghosts …

Somewhere under cover of them the sun went his way, transmitting a sulphurous heat. The very birds in the trees of Trinity were oppressed and did not twitter. The very leaves did not whisper.

Out through the railings, and across the road, prowled a skimpy and dingy cat, trying to look like a tiger.

It was all very sinister and dismal.

He helped himself to some more marmalade, and poured out another cup of coffee.

Nothing is more thrilling, thought he, than to be treated as a cully by the person you hold in the hollow of your hand.

But within this great irony lay (to be glided over) another irony. He knew well in what mood Zuleika had done what she had done to him last night; yet he preferred to accept her explanation of it.

What fun had he had? Last night, he had forgotten to kiss Zuleika when he held her by the wrists. Today it had been as much as he could do to let poor little Katie kiss his hand.

Better be vulgar with Byron than a noodle with Dorset! he bitterly reflected⁠ ⁠…

Still, noodledom was nearer than vulgarity to dandyism. It was a less flagrant lapse. And he had over Byron this further advantage: his noodledom was not a matter of common knowledge;

The smile was still on his face as he passed out from his room.

Down the stairs he passed, and “Oh,” every stair creaked faintly, “I ought to have been marble!”

And it did indeed seem that Mrs. Batch and Katie, who had hurried out into the hall, were turned to some kind of stone at sight of the descending apparition. A moment ago, Mrs.

Is it harder for a coward to fight with his fists than to kill himself? Or again, is it easier for him to die than to endure a prolonged crossfire of women’s wrath and scorn?

This I know: that in the life of even the least and meanest of us there is somewhere one fine moment⁠—one high chance not missed.

I like to think it was by operation of this law that Noaks had now clambered out upon the windowsill, silencing, sickening, scattering like chaff the women beneath him.

She deserved to suffer, you say? Maybe.

I merely state that she did suffer.

Emerging into Catherine Street, she knew whereabouts she was, and made straight for Judas, turning away her eyes as she skirted the Broad, that place of mocked hopes and shattered ideals.

“Dead?” he gasped. “Dead? It is disgraceful that I was not told. What did they die of?”

“Yes. I am an epidemic, grand-papa, a scourge, such as the world has not known. Those young men drowned themselves for love of me.”

He came towards her. “Do you realise, girl, what this means to me? I am an old man. For more than half a century I have known this College.