She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy! - Henry James

I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience — or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.

They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.

Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.