Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.

Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.

He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.

He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.