To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them.

He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.

His eyes, blind to external reality but highly perceptive in the realm of the inner life, rose from the book to the ceiling and returned to the book.

Each person is worth the value put on them by the affection of others, and that is where popular wisdom has found that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Lovers' language, give me an exact and poetic comparison to say what those eyes of Capitu were like. No image comes to mind that doesn't offend against the rules of good style, to say what they were and what they did to me. Undertow eyes? Why not? Undertow. That's the notion that the new expression put in my head. They held some kind of mysterious, active fluid, a force that dragged one in, like the undertow of a wave retreating from the shore on stormy days. So as not to be dragged in, I held onto anything around them, her ears, her arms, her hair spread about her shoulders; but as soon as I returned to the pupils of her eyes again, the wave emerging from them grew towards me, deep and dark, threatening to envelop me, draw me in and swallow me up.

Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them.