"Love is a fallacy"

Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are they very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender yourself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it -- this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. 

"Raccoon?" I said, pausing in my flight.

"Anything," he affirmed in ringing tones. 

time would supply the lack. She already had the makings.

Gracious she was, by gracious, I mean full of graces. She had an erectness of carriage, an ease of beating, a poise that clearly indicated the best of breeding. At table, her manners were exquisite. 

He was a torn man. First, he looked at the coat with the expression of a waif at a bakery window. Then he turned away and set his jaw resolutely. Then he looked back at the coat, with even more longing in his face. Then he turned away, but with not so much resolution this time. Back and forth his head swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning. Finally he didn't turn away at all; he just stood and stared with mad lust at the coat. 

This loomed as a project of no small dimensions. 

But then I reconsidered. I had wasted one evening: I might as well waste another. Who knew? Maybe somewhere in the extinct crater of her mind, a few embers still smoldered. Maybe somehow I could fan them into flame.  Admittedly it was not a prospect fraught with hope, but I decided to give it one more try. 

I watched her closely as she knit her creamy brow in concentration. Suddenly, a glimmer of intelligence--the first I had seen--came into her eyes. 

It was like digging a tunnel. At first everything was work, sweat, and darkness. I had no idea when I would reach the light, or even if I would. But I persisted. I pounded and clawed and scraped, and finally I was rewarded. I saw a chink of light. And then the chink got bigger and the sun came pouring in and all was bright. 

"pub talk and the king's English"

However intricate the ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not indulge in anything that deserves the name of conversation.

The charm of conversation is that it does not really start from anywhere, and no one has any idea where it will go as it meanders or leaps and sparkles or just glows. 

They are like the musketeers of Dumas who, although they lived side by side with each other, did not delve into each other's lives or the recesses  of their thoughts and feelings. 

The glow of the conversation burst into flames. There were affirmations and protests and denials, and of course the promise...

After five centuries of growth, of tussling with the French of the Normans and Angevins and the Plantagenets and at last absorbing it, the conquered in the end conquering the conqueror; English had come royally into its own. ... The Elizabethans blew on it as on a dandelion clock, and its seeds multiplied, and floated to the ends of the earth. （英语是一朵蒲公英，被英国文艺复兴一代吹向了世界各个角落）