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[thomasmannia]

[thomasmannia]

[thomasmannia]

She tried to comfort herself with the idea, that what he imagined her to be, did not alter the fact of what she was. But it was a truism, a phantom, and broke down under the weight of her regret.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all. Households were changed by absence, or death, or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us on imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother earth.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

“It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive.”

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

Nature felt no change, and was ever young.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

For months past, all her own personal cares and troubles had had to be stuffed away into a dark cupboard; but now she had leisure to take them out, and mourn over them, and study their nature, and seek the true method of subduing them into the elements of peace. All these weeks she had been conscious of their existence in a dull kind of way, though they were hidden out of sight. Now, once for all she would consider them, and appoint to each of them its right work in her life. So she sat almost motionless for hours in the drawing-room, going over the bitterness of every remembrance with an unwincing resolution.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

She was not sure of the nature of the emotions she had provoked. It was only their violence that was clear.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, “All are shadows! - all are passing! - all is past!” And when the morning dawned, cool and gray, like many a happier morning before - when Margaret looked one by one at the sleepers, it seemed as if the terrible night were unreal as a dream; it, too, was a shadow. It, too, was past.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

[thomasmannia]

All the things around me were made of the same material as I, a sort of messy suffering.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[thomasmannia]

They imagine that the sounds flow into them, sweet, nourishing, and that their sufferings become music, like Werther; they think that beauty is compassionate to them.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[thomasmannia]

I know very well that I don’t want to do anything: to do something is to create existence-and there’s quite enough existence as it is.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[thomasmannia]

A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[thomasmannia]

All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[thomasmannia]

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

[thomasmannia]

…existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing-not even a memory.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea