There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

...solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. *** Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.