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Не помню, почему пришлось ночевать в Технологическом институте. Рано утром прибежала женщина, в тот момент, когда я еще спал на шубе. Она сказала, разбудив меня:
- Разведите меня с мужем.
- Я унтер-офицер, начальник броневого автомобиля, у меня машина и пять человек команды. Как я могу разводить?
- Но ведь революция,- ответила женщина.- Я давно хлопочу.
Мы подумали всей командой и решили развести женщину; выдали удостоверение в том, что она разведена именем революции. Печать поставили химической лаборатории (другой у нас не было), просительница же настаивала, чтобы печать была непременно.

Виктор Шкловский, "Жили-были"

«Ах, как она одевается! Не то чтобы некрасиво, не модно, а просто жалко. Какая-то странная, яркая, желтоватая юбка с этакой пошленькой бахромой и красная кофточка. И щеки такие вымытые, вымытые!»

Железная крошка Наташа противная, спору нет, но чем сестрам не угодили вымытые щеки? Все ж лучше, чем не вымытые… Или это значит, что девушка румяна и не отличается чеховской бледностью?

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

George Eliot, "Scenes of Clerical Life"

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past – sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories. And if there were such a thing as taking averages of feeling, it would certainly be found that in the hunting and shooting seasons regret, self-reproach, and mortified pride weigh lighter on country gentlemen than in late spring and summer.

George Eliot, “Adam Bede”

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence. And the aged peasant woman most of all believes that her dead are conscious. Decent burial was what Lisbeth had been thinking of for herself through years of thrift, with an indistinct expectation that she should know when she was being carried to the churchyard, followed by her husband and her sons; and now she felt as if the greatest work of her life were to be done in seeing that Thias was buried decently before her -- under the white thorn, where once, in a dream, she had thought she lay in the coffin, yet all the while saw the sunshine above and smelt the white blossoms that were so thick upon the thorn the Sunday she went to be churched after Adam was born.

George Eliot, “Adam Bede”

In about half an hour the untidy girl, not yet dressed for her evening labours, brought him his chop and potatoes, and Mr Harding begged for a pint of sherry. He was impressed with an idea, which was generally prevalent a few years since, and is not yet wholly removed from the minds of men, that to order a dinner at any kind of inn, without also ordering a pint of wine for the benefit of the landlord, was a kind of fraud,-- not punishable, indeed, by law, but not the less abominable on that account. Mr Harding remembered his coming poverty, and would willingly have saved his half-crown, but he thought he had no alternative; and he was soon put in possession of some horrid mixture procured from the neighbouring public-house.

Anthony Trollope, “The Warden”

And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission, -- not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. ( Read more... )

Месяца два собиралась посмотреть в словаре, что за дерево monkey puzzle. Араукария!
( красивое )
The origin of the popular English name Monkey-puzzle derives from its early cultivation in Britain in about 1850, when the species was still very rare in gardens and not widely known. The proud owner of a young specimen at Pencarrow garden near Bodmin in Cornwall was showing it to a group of friends, and one made the remark "It would puzzle a monkey to climb that"; as the species had no existing popular name, first 'monkey-puzzler', then 'monkey-puzzle' stuck.
In France it is known as "désespoir des singes" or "monkeys' despair".

I want to make my mid-term report on the two books you suggested I should discuss with my students. In connection with Mansfield Park I had them read the works mentioned by the characters in the novel – the two first cantos of the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Cowper’s “The Task,” passages from King Henry the Eighth, Crabbe’s tale “The Parting  Hour,” bits of Johnson’s The Idler,  Browne’s address to “A Pipe of Tobaccco” (Imitation of Pope), Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (the whole “gate-and-no-key” passage comes from there – and the starling) and of course Lovers’ Vows in Mrs. Inchbald’s inimitable translation (a scream). … I think I had more fun than my class.

V. Nabokov in a letter to E. Wilson