orange

Her complexion was sallow; and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill nature.

Perhaps just at present he may be undecided; the smallness of your fortune may make him hang back; his friends may all advise him against it. But some of those little attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily give, will fix him, in spite of himself. And there can be no reason why you should not try for him.

It was a great comfort to her, to be sure of exciting no interest in one person at least among their circle of friends; a great comfort to know that there was one who would meet her without feeling any curiosity after particulars, or any anxiety for her sister’s health. Every qualification is raised at times, by the circumstances of the moment, to

“No, no,” cried Marianne, “misery such as mine has no pride. I care not who knows that I am wretched. The triumph of seeing me so may be open to all the world. Elinor, Elinor, they who suffer little may be proud and independent as they like—may resist insult, or return mortification—but I cannot. I must feel—I must be wretched—and they are welcome

You begin to know them, except time always leaves you one moment behind, and so you have to know them more, more and more, chasing them through time, at the limit where their life meets their future, and you need to have it, 360 degrees of what they see and feel and sense, or else your file is incomplete. Who did they love, before you? What hurt th

At the crux of all the time-travel hypotheses was the question: how do you measure a person? Graham scored very highly on spatial reasoning tests and well on verbal reasoning tests. He was, according to his psychoanalyst, dangerously repressed; but then again, according to the acclimatisation examiners, he was gregarious and confident. He was the e

Loyalty and obedience are fostered by stories. The Ministry and its satellites were staffed by people who believed they’d smoke one last jaunty cigarette in the eye of a gun. The truth was that we were shackled to the idea that the orders were good and the job was good. Keep calm is just another order like Shoot that man or Delete the rest

I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank

I thought I might have the energy to perform every action required to make a cup of tea, but I was surprised to remember how many there were: kettle-boiling, mug-fetching, milk-sniffing, teabag-choosing, teaspoon-handling. I poured a glass of tap water and sat at the kitchen table, staring into the soggy garden.