That man seems to me to be equal to a god.
That man, if it's not sacrilege, [seems] to surpass the gods
Who, sitting across from you, time and again
Watches and listens to you
laughing sweetly, which snatches away
all senses from poor me: for as soon as
I saw you, Lesbia, nothing remained
of the voice in my mouth.
But my tongue is stiff, a delicate flame runs
under my limbs, my ears ring
with their own sound, my eyes are covered
with twin darkness.
Leisure, Catullus, is trouble for you:
In leisure you become overjoyed and too passionate:
Leisure has destroyed kings before
And blessed cities.
Carmen 51, Catullus
‘Well, Lyolya?’ he asked, turning instantly to his daughter and addressing her with the careless tone of habitual tenderness natural to parents who have petted their children from babyhood, but which Prince Vasili had only acquired by imitating other parents.
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Only the Abbey Church is complete. Explore further at your own risk.
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Well, Thomas Becket, are you satisfied? I am naked at your tomb and your monks are coming to flog me. What an end to our storyl You, rotting in this tomb, larded with my barons' dagger thrusts, and I, naked, shivering in the draughts, and waiting like an idiot for those brutes to come and thrash me. Don't you think we'd have done better to understand each other?
Becket, or The Honour of God, Jean Anouilh
'My dear Child
'I have betrayed your confidence; I have endeavoured to pollute your mind, and have made your innocent heart acquainted with the looks and language of unlawful and monstrous passion. I must expiate these crimes, and must endeavour in some degree to proportionate my punishment to my guilt. You are I doubt not prepared for what I am about to announce; we must separate and be divided for ever.
'I deprive you of your parent and only friend. You are cast out shelterless on the world: your hopes are blasted; the peace and security of your pure mind destroyed; memory will bring to you frightful images of guilt, and the anguish of innocent love betrayed. Yet I who draw down all this misery upon you; I who cast you forth and remorselessly have set the seal of distrust and agony on the heart and brow of my own child, who with devilish levity have endeavoured to steal away her loveliness to place in its stead the foul deformity of sin; I, in the overflowing anguish of my heart, supplicate you to forgive me.
'I do not ask your pity; you must and do abhor me: but pardon me, Matilda, and let not your thoughts follow me in my banishment with unrelenting anger.'
Matilda, Mary Shelley