I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, ‘I love her, I love her, I love her!’ hundreds of times.
love
money
death
love
— Great Expectations
— The Masnavi Love’s blooming garden which lives evermore
Apart from joy and grief has fruits galore—
Being a lover is beyond this pair,
Fresh always, in both spring and autumn air.
— The Tale of Genji When in a good temper and engaged upon errands of love he adopted an entirely different voice and manner.
— The Decameron By learning how it is done, there may yet be time perhaps for you to save our souls from perdition, and you will also discover that, even though Love is more inclined to take up his abode in a gay palace and a dainty bedchamber than in a wretched hovel, there is no denying that he sometimes makes his powers felt among pathless woods, on rugged mountains, and in desert caves; nor is this surprising, since all living things are subject to his sway.
— The Golden Notebook I wanted to laugh, because it’s always funny, two people manoeuvring, so to speak, before sex; at the same time I felt a reluctance, precisely because I was in love; and I swear that either one of us might have broken the current, and said good night.
— Metamorphoses What you see is nowhere;
And what you love—but turn away—you lose!
— The Brothers Karamazov Or is it only the thousands of the strong and mighty who are dear to Your heart, while the millions of others, the weak ones, who love You too, weak as they are, and who are as numerous as the grains of sand on the beach, are to serve as material for the strong and mighty?
— The Decameron So the young man lay down at her side without attempting to touch her, and, concentrating his thoughts on his long love for her, on her present coldness towards him, and on the dashing of his hopes, he resolved not to go on living.
— The Mahabharata When Ruru saw Pramadvara in that hermitage of his, the righteous man, in control over himself, fell in love with her.
— Anna Karenina And remember that I’ve loved you and will always love you as my best friend!
— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
— The Mahabharata I love the handsome Kacha.
— To the Lighthouse Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
— Midnight's Children In the town of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters who were already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive plainness they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them, so that their bemused parents were endlessly pestered by a stream of men offering their hands in marriage to either or even both of the bewildering children; old men who had forsaken the wisdom of their beards and youths who ought to have been becoming besotted with the actresses in the travelling picture-show which visited Baud once a month; and there was another, more disturbing procession of bereaved families cursing the twin girls for having bewitched their sons into committing acts of violence against themselves, fatal mutilations and scourgings and even (in one case) self-immolation.
— The Decameron Since I know how ill it befits a king to return my love, which I can neither expel from my heart nor even suppress, and which is altogether too much for me to bear, I have chosen to die as the lesser evil, and die I shall.
— The Man Without Qualities ‘In short,’ re reflected, ‘creation does not come about for the sake of a theory, but——’ and he was about to conclude: ‘as a result of sheer power’, when another word all unexpectedly intervened and his thought ended like this: ‘no, it arises out of power and love, and the usual combination between these two is wrong!’
— The Brothers Karamazov Love man in his sin too, for such love resembles God’s love, the highest possible form of love on earth.
— The Arabian Nights My heart is her captive and willing slave,
Lost in love for al-Shamandal’s daughter.
— Anna Karenina I love you.
— The Tale of Genji Certain that this was a mere excuse, she sent in reply the poem: “The fault is mine and the regret, if careless as the peasant girl who stoops too low amid the sprouting rice I soiled my sleeve in love’s dark road.”
— One Hundred Years of Solitude “Do you love your aunt a lot?” she asked Aureliano José in an innocent way.
— Dead Souls Then pipes appeared on the scene: wooden pipes, clay pipes, meerschaum pipes; some new, some broken in, some in and some out of chamois covers; a recently won short pipe with an amber mouthpiece and a tobacco pouch embroidered by a countess who had met Nozdrev at some way station or other and fallen head over heels in love with him and whose little hands were, as he put it, “the most subtle superfluities”—this, apparently, an attempt on his part to convey the highest point of perfection.
— The Tale of Genji This morning he was still in a very emotional condition; with a wreath of wisteria flowers about his head, he was indulging in languorous airs which confirmed Genji’s previous suspicion that this prince had lately fallen seriously in love.
— Great Expectations Isn’t there bright eyes somewheres, wot you love the thoughts on?
— One Hundred Years of Solitude And much as he respected it, he could not love it—for one simple reason: it did not agree with him.
— The Tin Drum Once my visitors have placed their gifts on the little white oilcloth-covered table that stands beneath a watercolour of anemones, once they’ve laid out some future plan to save me, or one already under way, once they’ve managed to convince me, by their tireless attempts to rescue me, of the high quality of their brotherly love, they find renewed joy in their own existence and depart.
— The Arabian Nights Your love for me has transferred itself to me, and what I feel for you now is manyfold greater than what you feel for me.
— In Search of Lost Time This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her, something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing, that when he left her at seven o’clock to go and dress for the evening, all the way home in his brougham, unable to repress the happiness with which the afternoon’s adventure had filled him, he kept repeating to himself: “How nice it would be to have a little woman like that in whose house one could always be certain of finding, what one never can be certain of finding, a really good cup of tea.”
— The Red and the Black To read a well-written love letter is the supreme pleasure for a prude; it’s a moment’s respite.
— The Tale of Genji Suddenly he found himself wishing that it were a real love affair, and he became very depressed.
— The Decameron For his part, Andreuccio remembered that his father really had been in Palermo, and he knew from his own experience how lightly young men are apt to regard the love of a woman.
— The Mahabharata The worshipping is done in accordance with the rites, with garlands and ornaments, and the god who brings fortune is worshipped in his smiling form, a form he himself adopted out of his love for the great-souled Vasu.
— Metamorphoses Neptune she drew, changed to savage bull
For love of Canace; and Neptune too
Sired, as Enipeus, the Aloidae;
Bisaltes’ child he cheated as a ram;
The corn’s most gracious mother, golden-haired,
Suffered him as a horse, and, as a bird,
The snake-tressed mother of the flying steed;
And poor Melantho knew him as a dolphin.
money
— The Brothers Karamazov But is it correct to suggest that she entrusted that money to him in the humiliating and insulting manner implied here?
— The Brothers Karamazov The envelope, which had been closed with three large, red wax seals, had been torn open and was empty—the money was gone.
— The Man Without Qualities Money turns everything into a mere concept.
— Independent People Money will be easy enough to come by.
— Jacques the Fatalist He, without hesitating, sold everything he owned, linen, suits, instruments, furniture, books, got a sum of money together, bundled the two love-birds into a carriage, and accompanied them at a gallop as far as the Alps.
— Middlemarch Ay, ay; money’s a good egg; and if you’ve got money to leave behind you, lay it in a warm nest.
— The Brothers Karamazov So how could he possibly even consider giving me money which would, if anything, strengthen the possibility, when he’s crazy about her himself?
— The Brothers Karamazov In general, it was strange that such a cultured, proud, and apparently prudent young man as Ivan should come to that scandalous house to join a father who had ignored him all his life, who didn’t know him, indeed, hardly remembered that he existed, a father who would most certainly have refused to give him money under any circumstances and who lived in constant dread lest either of his younger sons, Ivan or Alexei, should one day come and ask him for help.
— Great Expectations That is to say, you will now take your money affairs entirely into your own hands, and you will draw from Wemmick one hundred and twenty-five pounds per quarter, until you are in communication with the fountain-head, and no longer with the mere agent.
— The Brothers Karamazov But that money you showed me just now.
— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Now the way that the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich.
— The Brothers Karamazov So I’ve been wondering what it was that could have infuriated him enough to make him trample that money underfoot, for, believe me, he had no idea himself until the very last second that he’d throw it down and stamp on it.
— Absalom, Absalom! “Came back home and found his chances of descendants gone where his children had attended to that, and his plantation ruined, fields fallow except for a fine stand of weeds, and taxes and levies and penalties sowed by United States marshals and such and all his niggers gone where the Yankees had attended to that, and you would have thought he would have been satisfied: yet before his foot was out of the stirrup he not only set out to try to restore his plantation to what it used to be, like maybe he was hoping to fool the Creditor by illusion and obfuscation by concealing behind the fact that time and change had not elapsed and occurred the fact that he was now almost sixty years old until he could get himself a new batch of children to bulwark him, but chose for this purpose the last woman on earth he might have hoped to prevail on, this Aunt R–all right all right all right.–that hated him, that had always hated him, yet choosing her with a kind of outrageous bravado as if a kind of despairing conviction of his irresistibility or invulnerability were a part of the price he had got for whatever it was he had sold the Creditor since according to the old dame he never had had a soul; proposed to her and was accepted–then three months later, with no date ever set for the wedding and marriage itself not mentioned one time since, and on the very day when he established definitely that he would be able to keep at least some of his land and how much, he approached her and suggested they breed like a couple of dogs together, inventing with fiendish cunning the thing which husbands and fiances have been trying to invent for ten million years: the thing that without harming her or giving her grounds for civil or tribal action would not only blast the little dream-woman out of the dovecote but leave her irrevocably husbanded (and himself, husband or fiance, already safely cuckolded before she can draw breath) with the abstract carcass of outrage and revenge; who said it and was free now, forever more now of threat or meddling from anyone since he had at last eliminated the last member of his late wife’s family, free now: son fled to Texas or California or maybe even South America, daughter doomed to spinsterhood to live until he died, since after that it wouldn’t matter, in that rotting house, caring for him and feeding him, raising chickens and peddling the eggs for the clothes she and Clytie couldn’t make: so that he didn’t even need to be a demon now but just mad impotent old man who had realised at last that his dream of restoring his Sutpen’s Hundred was not only vain but that what he had left of it would never support him and his family and so running his little crossroads store with a stock of plowshares and hame strings and calico and kerosene and cheap beads and ribbons and a clientele of freed niggers and (what is it? the word? white what?–Yes, trash) with Jones for clerk and who knows maybe what delusions of making money out of the store to rebuild the plantation; who had escaped twice now, got himself into it and been freed by the Creditor who set his children to destroying one another before he had posterity, and he decided that maybe he was wrong in being free and so got into it again and then decided that he was wrong in being unfree and so got out of it again–and then turned right around and bought his way back into it with beads and calico and striped candy out of his own showcase and off his shelves?”
— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Up stairs the hall was dark, but I found the duke’s room, and started to paw around it with my hands; but I recollected it wouldn’t be much like the king to let anybody else take care of that money but his own self; so then I went to his room and began to paw around there.
— The Decameron After having fed him in a manner appropriate to his renown, he saw that he was richly clothed, provided him with money and a saddle-horse, and offered him the freedom of his household.
— Middlemarch Lydgate’s thought, when Bulstrode paused according to his wont, was, “He has perhaps been losing a good deal of money.”
— Anna Karenina She’s in debt all around, and she has no money.
— Middlemarch Take the money.
— The Brothers Karamazov Here, take your money.
— Berlin Alexanderplatz We know people are short of money.
— The Brothers Karamazov And she would understand, then, that since this time I was bringing back half the sum she had entrusted to me, I would pay her back the rest too—I mean the money I squandered, even if it took me my whole lifetime to earn it or to raise it.
— A Sentimental Education One day she told him that she had an important piece of news for him: friend Arnoux had recently set up one of his former female factory hands in a linen-draper’s shop and he was going there every evening and spending a lot of money; only a week ago, he’d even presented her with a suite of rosewood furniture.
— The Brothers Karamazov Such donations are usually a self-imposed penance and are always paid out of money earned by the person’s own labor.
— The Red and the Black Coarseness and the most brutal indifference about any question that did not involve money, precedence, or a cross, and a blind hatred for every argument that opposed their interests, these things seemed to her as natural in the male sex as wearing boots and a felt hat.
— The Sound of the Mountain Yet if Shingo had shown more sympathy, she would not have had to submit to the indignity of having the money for her abortion come from her husband’s mistress.
— Jacques the Fatalist Anyway, it’s the only pleasure that doesn’t cost money.
— The Brothers Karamazov So we have the murderer jumping down from the fence as a precaution, to make sure that the only witness to his crime is dead, although he is a murderer who has left next to the body of his father, whom he has just killed, what the prosecutor himself described as a fatal piece of incriminating evidence, in the form of the envelope that had contained the money.
— The Magic Mountain ‘He hasn’t much money, I suppose?’ Hans Castorp asked as they entered Joachim’s room.
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ——I’ll pay you the money, brother Shandy, quoth my uncle Toby, looking at the two mortars with infinite pleasure, and putting his hand into his breeches-pocket, as he viewed them.
— History Meanwhile, with what money he could scrape up at present, every time he came to Rome he would visit her.
— Great Expectations Among these were the name of a banking-house in New South Wales where a sum of money was, and the designation of certain lands of considerable value.
— Independent People I have plenty of money and my family are, comparatively speaking, just as healthy as you Utirauthsmyri folk, who I don’t suppose are more than mortal, and apparently much healthier than the merchant’s family, who you say are sent abroad every year to distant continents in search of doctors.
— Middlemarch He had scorned even to form conjectures about Mr. Vincy’s intentions on money matters, and nothing but extremity could have induced him to apply to his father-in-law, even if he had not been made aware in various indirect ways since his marriage that Mr. Vincy’s own affairs were not flourishing, and that the expectation of help from him would be resented.
death
— The Masnavi That base vizier, the spawn of jealousies,
Wasting his faculties on vanities,
Hoped that his bitter envy’s poisonous breath
Would make the souls of poor men meet their death:
If out of envy men turn up their nose
They’ll lose their nose for striking such a pose,
Each person’s nose is there to breathe in scent
And one can send you to the firmament:
Whoever lacks it must forsake his nose,
This holy scent through which the spirit grows,
And should he catch a whiff, but not sing praise
His nose will be devoured for his sick ways,
Therefore give thanks and serve all grateful folk,
To live on, be as dead as dust and smoke!
— Journey to the End of the Night I kept wondering why he was so intent on sending other people to their death.
— The Red and the Black Julien had slept well, he was quite calm, and felt nothing more than a philosophical pity for the envious crowd which, without cruelty, would soon be applauding his death sentence.
— Berlin Alexanderplatz If you weren’t involved in the death, had no interest in it.
— Essays From this consideration is derived the custom, which we have in wars, of punishing even with death those who obstinately defend a place which by the rules of war cannot be held.
— The Magic Mountain Death is to be honoured as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal.
— Anna Karenina While Levin and others, though they could say a lot about death, obviously did not know, because they were afraid of death and certainly had no idea what needed to be done when people were dying.
— In Search of Lost Time He was so powerful, in such high favour with people in office, that he made it possible for us to transgress laws which Françoise had taught me to regard as more ineluctable than the laws of life and death, as when we were allowed to postpone for a year the compulsory repainting of the walls of our house, alone among all the houses in that part of Paris, or when he obtained permission from the Minister for Mme Sazerat’s son, who had been ordered to some watering-place, to take his baccalaureate two months in advance, among the candidates whose surnames began with “A,” instead of having to wait his turn as an “S.”
— Absalom, Absalom! And your grandfather never knew if it was Clytie who watched, kept in touch by some means, waited for the day, the moment, to come, the hour when the little boy would be an orphan, and so went herself to fetch him; or if it was Judith who did the waiting and the watching and sent Clytie for him that winter, that December of 1871;—Clytie who had never been further from Sutpen’s Hundred than Jefferson in her life, yet who made that journey alone to New Orleans and returned with the child, the boy of twelve now and looking ten, in one of the outgrown Fauntleroy suits but with a new oversize overall jumper coat which Clytie had bought for him (and made him wear, whether against the cold or whether not your grandfather could not say either) over it and what else he owned tied up in a bandana handkerchief—this child who could speak no English as the woman could speak no French who had found him, hunted him down, in a French city and brought him away, this child with a face not old but without age, as if he had had no childhood, not in the sense that Miss Rosa Coldfield says she had no childhood, but as if he had not been human born but instead created without agency of man or agony of woman and orphaned by no human being (your grandfather said you did not wonder what had become of the mother, you did not ever care: death or elopement or marriage: who would not grow from one metamorphosis—dissolution or adultery—to the next carrying along with her all the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory, the recognisable I, but changing from phase to phase as the butterfly changes once the cocoon is cleared, carrying nothing of what was into what is, leaving nothing of what is behind but eliding complete and intact and unresisting into the next avatar as the overblown rose or magnolia elides from one rich June to the next, leaving no bones, no substance, no dust of whatever dead pristine soulless rich surrender anywhere between sun and earth) but produced complete and subject to no microbe in that cloyed and scented maze of shuttered silk as if he were the delicate and perverse spirit-symbol, immortal page of the ancient immortal Lilith, entering the actual world not at the age of one second but of twelve years, the delicate garments of his pagehood already half concealed beneath that harsh and shapeless denim cut to an iron pattern and sold by the millions—that burlesque uniform and regalia of the tragic burlesque of the sons of Ham;—a slight child who could not even speak English, picked suddenly up out of whatever debacle the only life he knew had disintegrated into, by a creature whom he had seen once and learned to dread and fear yet could not flee, held helpless and passive in a state which must have been some incredible compound of horror and trust, since although he could not even talk to her (they made, they must have made, that week’s journey by steamboat among the cotton bales on the freight deck, eating and sleeping with negroes, where he could not even tell his companion when he was hungry or when he had to relieve himself) and so could have only suspected, surmised, where she was taking him, could have known nothing certainly except that all he had ever been familiar with was vanishing about him like smoke, yet he made no resistance, returning quietly and docilely to that decaying house which he had seen one time, where the fierce brooding woman who had come and got him lived with the calm white one who was not even fierce, who was not anything except calm, who to him did not even have a name yet who was somehow so closely related to him as to be the owner of the one spot on earth where he had ever seen his mother weep;—returned, crossed that strange threshold, that irrevocable demarcation, not led, not dragged, but driven and herded by that stern implacable presence, into that gaunt and barren household where his very silken remaining clothes, his delicate shirt and stockings and shoes which still remained to remind him of what he had once been, vanished, fled from arms and body and legs as if they had been woven of chimaeras or of smoke.
— The Sound of the Mountain For a good fifty years, from her twenties to her death at seventy-five, she had worn her hair straight back and held in place by a comb.
— The Magic Mountain Those idealistic powers of resistance to illness and death, whose defeat by the overwhelming forces of base nature so pained Herr Settembrini, were absolutely alien to little Naphta; and his method for coping with the deterioration of his body was not sorrow and gloom, but scornful high spirits and an unparalleled aggressiveness, a mania for intellectual doubt, negation and confusion, all of which severely aggravated the other man’s melancholy and daily intensified their intellectual arguments.
— The Epic of Gilgamesh Life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose.
— The Arabian Nights He said to her, “O my lady, this separation will lead to my destruction and death.
— Moby-Dick; or, The Whale Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death?
— The Tale of Genji I have good reason to suppose that the whole story about her death was a complete mistake.
— Journey to the End of the Night And by the same token there would be so much love that Death would be shut up inside it with tenderness, and Death would be so cosy-comfortable in there, the bitch, that she’d finally start enjoying herself, she’d get pleasure out of love along with everyone else.
— The Decameron He was then interrogated and confessed to the murder, adding that he had been unable to find his way out of the cave; whereupon the praetor, whose name was Marcus Varro, sentenced him to death by crucifixion, which in those days was the regular method of execution.
— Middlemarch Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate can go on holding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black about the thousand pounds he took just at that man’s death.
— The Brothers Karamazov “It must be a special sign from heaven then,” others chimed in eagerly, and their opinion was accepted unquestionably when they explained that even an ordinary sinner’s body does not usually start to decay until about twenty-four hours after death, whereas in this case it had started uncannily soon, and that was also against the laws of nature and therefore must be seen as the finger of God!
— The Mahabharata The man who hears this is cleansed from all his sins, gets to know everything and finally attains the highest state after death.
— Memoirs of Hadrian It is going to let me depart, without too much concern, into death itself.
— History The initial phase of his attack, which had lasted only a few seconds, was already past, however, and when Ida knelt beside him, the ugly color of death was already fading from his face, as he resumed breathing.
— 1984 It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it.
— In Search of Lost Time As I sat there on an ottoman and heard my grandmother, who was unperturbed by the fact that he listened to her with his hat on and whistled a little tune to himself, inquire of him in an artificial tone of voice, “So what are your … charges? Goodness me, much too much for my slender means!,” I tried to shrink as far as possible into myself, to flee on the wings of eternal verities, to leave nothing of myself, nothing live, on the surface of my body—desensitized like the body of an animal which by inhibition feigns death when wounded—so as not to suffer too much pain in a place where my total lack of habit was made all the more agonizing by the sight of people who seemed to be in their element, an elegant lady for whom the manager showed his respect by freely fondling the little dog that followed her about, a young dandy who came strolling in wearing a hat with a feather and asking whether there was “Any post?,” people for whom climbing the imitation-marble stairs meant they were almost home.
— The Epic of Gilgamesh Because of my brother I am afraid of death, because of my brother I stray through the wilderness.
— History Death, however, proved to have been caused by an initial stab with the scissors, which had cut the woman’s carotid artery; but the murderer had continued striking the unconscious body with every object he could get his hands on.
— Madame Bovary A philosopher does not fear death.
— History After Ninnuzzu’s death, he had fallen at first into a feverish restlessness, which every now and then drove him from his little Roman domicile, towards those places which still, from his brief past, could represent a kind of family.
— Memoirs of Hadrian I tell myself that suicide is not rare, and that it is common to die at twenty; that the death of Antinous is a problem and a catastrophe for me alone.
— Hunger I tell you, if you exist, this my last word in life or in death—I bid you farewell, for all time and eternity—I bid you farewell with heart and reins.
— One Hundred Years of Solitude Lying on cushions, as if she really were ill, she braided her long hair and rolled it about her ears as death had told her it should be on her bier.
— The Man Without Qualities He makes me think of death.
— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn He chased me round and round the place, with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death and saying he would kill me and then I couldn’t come for him no more.