When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.

Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.