Unit 4: Selection Vocabulary 4

When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it.

There is some truth in what you say—exaggerated and strained as your view of it is.

There is another task I must undertake first.

I know quite well, Torvald, that most people would think you right, and that views of that kind are to be found in books; but I can no longer content myself with what most people say, or with what is found in books.

Such a man was he, gloomy, misanthropical, tired of the world, with a few dozen broken love-affairs among his varied experiences.

I gave up all my most ambitious plans and cherished schemes, because he disliked women whose names were constantly in the mouth of the public. In fact, I became quiet, sedate, dignified, renounced too some of my best and dearest friends.

It seems as though that fickle goddess, Fortune, showered every blessing, save one, on my path.

An unfortunate chain of circumstances drove him from his father's home branded as a forger.

As he neared the door, all the old love rose in me like a flood, drowning the sorrows of past years, and overwhelming me in a deluge of pity.

Somewhere, perhaps on God's earth he wanders outcast, forsaken, loveless.

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much.

There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honor of the time.

“I drink,” he said, “to the buried that repose around us.”

It seemed to have been constructed for no especial use in itself, but formed merely the interval between two of the colossal supports of the roof of the catacombs, and was backed by one of their circumscribing walls of solid granite.

After all, that glory that we saw for all these years, that man with divine fire, changed us also—and such as we are, we have been molded by him during these years; and out of that divine fire many of us also took a small spark which strengthened and made us work to some extent on the lines that he fashioned.

Great men and eminent men have monuments in bronze and marble set up for them, but this man of divine fire managed in his lifetime to become enshrined in millions and millions of hearts so that all of us became somewhat of the stuff that he was made of, though to an infinitely lesser degree.

And if those living flames exist, there will not be darkness in this land, and we shall be able, with our effort, remembering him and following his path, to illumine this land again, small as we are, but still with the fire that he instilled into us.

We stand on this perilous edge of the present, between that past and the future to be, and we face all manner of perils.

He has gone, and all over India there is a feeling of having been left desolate and forlorn.