Elective Affinities Quotes
"You, for your part, will get on your side the finest room in the house for yourself."
"She easily grasped what she was supposed to take care of."
"Charlotte particularly enjoyed her occasional closely-observed but affectionate descriptions."
"Charlotte believed you could not get to know the character of the people you had to live with too quickly."
"Human beauty acts with far greater force on both inner and outer senses."
"She had at all times the same quiet attentiveness and the same unruffled alertness."
"She knew how to give directions without seeming to be giving orders."
"A condition like this, by opening the heart elevates the mind."
"The mutual affections which had developed were having the pleasantest effect upon our friends."
"And so she became for the men more and more what she had been from the first, which was (to call things by their right names) a feast for the eyes."
"It is an infinite debt, it can be paid only in eternity."
"Marriage is the beginning and the pinnacle of all culture."
"The consciousness of loving and of being loved drives him beyond all bounds."
"If you love one person, love from the very heart, all other people seem lovable too!"
"The nature of love is such that it believes it alone is in the right, that all other rights vanish before the rights of love."
"Not until he reached a grass slope did he put her down and when he did so it was not without a feeling of agitation and confusion."
"They passed some of the night in chatter and pleasantry which was all the freer since unhappily the heart had no part in it."
"To repose one day beside those you love is the pleasantest idea you can have when you come to think about the Beyond."
"It is a kind of comfort and consolation to set upon a child's grave a feeble wooden cross, and to decorate it with a wreath."
"The pure feeling that, at least after death, we are all one and all equal, seems to me more comforting than this obstinate obdurate continuing on with the personalities, attachments, and circumstances of our life."
"A portrait is an independent thing; wherever it stands, it stands in its own right, and we shall not require that it should mark the actual grave."
"The architect's collection of weapons and ancient utensils... testifies to us how vain is man's provision for the preservation of his personality after death."
"We play with prophecies, intuitions, and dreams, and use them to try to give some significance to everyday life."
"A human being can comprehend misfortune only up to a certain degree; what goes beyond this degree destroys him or leaves him indifferent."
"Sometimes you are with a real person in the same way as you are with a portrait."
"The case of the craftsman and the sculptor supplies the clearest evidence that man is least able to make his own that which most completely belongs to him."
"Ancient peoples had a solemn conception which can seem dreadful to us. They imagined their ancestors as sitting in great caverns on a circle of thrones in silent converse with one another."