The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Novel (Perennial Classics)

She had accepted the fact that it was of no importance whether her work went on or not; it was enough to work.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.

but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long?”

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love,

he gazed for an hour upon the great clouds of pearl that hang forever upon the horizon of that sea, and extracted from their beauty a resignation that he did not permit his reason to examine.

It was the hour when the father returns home from the fields and plays for a moment in the yard with the dog that jumps upon him, holding his muzzle closed or throwing him upon his back. The young girls look about for the first star to fix a wish upon it, and the boys grow restless for supper. Even the busiest mother stands for a moment idle-handed

quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, of her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine.

We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world.