But she had learnt, in those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working.

...and yet, the only thing about this year, he thinks, the only times that he has been completely honest with himself are on the nights he's spent here. Only among the crowd of the failed has he felt comfortable living inside his own defeat.

Abigail had no interest in the dolls themselves. Only in what she could keep from them.

The street was a sad state in daylight. Electric signs and red lights resisted the brightness of life, stripped of their luster in the colorless day. But in darkness and mist, they pulsed with vibrancy. The streets thrived in a cloak of obscurity, and men took comfort in anonymity. At night they were a motley bunch, a throng of shadowed faces and hungry eyes, milling about brothels and dance halls like rats roaming a sewer.

As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless.

Upper-class Victorians feared an overabundance of passion, believing it only complicated matters and, more dangerously, led to thoughts of unrealistic liaisons between persons of unequal social stations.

I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded.

For reasons I have yet to define, Signor Arpelli stood out from his colleagues. The curled brim of his hat, perhaps. A certain mingling of gravity and levity- I thought the masks of Janus had merged in his eyes.

In fact, vibrators were one of the first appliances to be electrified in the late nineteenth century, not long after the sewing machine but well ahead of the vacuum cleaner. It seems the Victorians had their priorities right.

Tonight, I'd like to fuck like every other bloody Englishman, with you on your back and me on top groaning and pumping away for a minute or so, then a nice sleep." A sneer touched the edge of her mouth, then Isabeau laughed. "You English, you are so uninspired, a pity for your women. My soul cries for them." "Yes, unimaginative lot that we are, we have somehow managed to colonize much of the world.