The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Emmuska Orczy

When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys.

… you know my belief in bald-headed Fortune, with the one solitary hair. Well, I meant to grab that hair…

adventure, the-scarlet-pimpernel

…women have done strange things; they are a far greater puzzle to the student of human nature than the sterner, less complex sex has ever been.

Anonymity crowned him as if t’were the halo of romantic glory.

mystery, romance, unknown

The moral crisis she’d just gone through made her feel indulgent toward the faults, the delinquencies of others. How thoroughly a human being can be buffeted and over-mastered by fate had been borne in upon her with appalling force.

compassion, discipleship, empathy, maturity, sympathy

…and in repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one’s admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close.

The chairs – turned towards one another in groups of twos and threes – seemed like the seats of ghosts in close conversation with one another. There were sets of two chairs – very close to one another – in the far corners of the room, which spoke of recent whispered flirtations, over cold game pie and iced champagne; there were sets of three and four chairs, that recalled pleasant animated discussions over the latest scandals; there were chairs straight up in a row that still looked starchy, critical, acid, like antiquated dowagers; there were a few isolated, single chairs, close to the table, that spoke of gourmands intent on the most recherche dishes, and others overturned on the floor, that spoke volumes on the subject of my Lord Grenville’s cellars.

descriptive-prose, satire

… Mr Jellyband was indeed a typical rural John Bull of those days — the days when our prejudiced insularity was at its height, when to an Englishman, be he lord, yeoman, or peasant, the whole of the continent of Europe was a den of immorality and the rest of the world an unexploited land of savages and cannibals.

england, insularity, parochialism, racism

The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past.

history, imagination, perspective, reading

Dear heart,” he murmured, “do not look on me with those dear, scared eyes of yours. If there is aught that puzzles you in what I said, try and trust me a little longer. Remember, I must save the Dauphin at all costs; mine honor is bound with his safety. What happens to me after that matters but little, yet I wish to live for your dear sake.

adventure, france, honor, love, the-scarlet-pimprenel, trust

She looks very virtuous and very melancholy.””Virtue is like the precious odors, most fragrant when it is crushed.

happiness, hardship, joy, virtue

Is it love to worship a saint in heaven, whom you dare not touch, who hovers above you like a cloud, which floats away from you even as you gaze? To love is to feel one being in the world at one with us, our equal in sin as well as in virtue. To love, for us men, is to clasp one woman with our arms, feeling that she lives and breathes just as we do, suffers as we do, thinks with us, loves with us, and, above all, sins with us. Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall at the feet of your idol an you wish, but drag her down to your level after that- the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart.

angel, love, romance