pearls before swine

“A person fucks himself up so much,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, “Fucks himself up so much just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can’t do anything about it.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”

“She by now was preening herself, between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent, and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiser one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘she will like Jean Christophe?’ Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.”

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

“He knew she was there by the joy and fear that overwhelmed his heart.”

Anna Karenina, Leo  Tolstoy

“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars—a cage, so peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.”

Villette, Charlotte Bronte