No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.
Joseph Sheridan Le FanuThere comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.
Joseph Sheridan Le FanuThere is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.
Joseph Sheridan Le FanuOld persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.
Joseph Sheridan Le FanuWomen are so enigmatical - some in everything - all in matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is repulsive?
Joseph Sheridan Le FanuFor some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu