a lifeline, it seems

I've come to realise this year that one of the things which helps keep me... grounded, you could say, during exams is having leisure reading on hand. Last semester it was Jane Austen's Persuasion, and this semester it seems to be Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White... and it's gooooood. Truly creepy at times and amazing writing throughout! Brilliantly crafted narration. And though there are many parts worthy of quoting, I must admit, this has been my favourite so far (it may or may not be related to the fact that one of my good friends got engaged this past weekend! How sweet!!):

"The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

I loved her.

Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth...


All memory of the past, all thought of the future, all sense of the falseness and hopelessness of my own position, lay hushed within me into deceitful rest. Lulled by the Syren-song that my own heart sung to me, with eyes shut to all sight, and ears closed to all sound of danger, I drifted nearer and nearer to the fatal rocks. The warning that aroused me at last, and startled me into sudden, self-accusing consciousness of my own weakness, was the plainest, the truest, the kindest of all warnings, for it came silently from her."


Man, it's good!!! :))