Robert Louis Stevenson

Being in a civilised country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell my lady friend and be off by the diligence that afternoon.

And he began to laugh again, and that so heartily, that, though I did not see the joke as he did, I was again obliged to join him in his mirth.

The wind blowing steady and gentle from the south, there was no contrariety between that and the current, and the billows rose and fell unbroken.

It was a long, difficult business, for the coins were of all countries and sizes — doubloons, and louis d'ors, and guineas, and pieces of eight, and I know not what besides, all shaken together at random.

The wind, serving us to a desire, now hauled into the west.

When did ever a gentleman o’ fortune show his stern to that much dollars for a boosy old seaman with a blue mug — and him dead too?

[…] I could hear nothing but a low gabbling; but at last the voices began to grow higher, and I could pick up a word or two […]

Just then, with a roar and a whistle, a round-shot passed high above the roof of the log-house and plumped far beyond us in the wood.

It was such a scene of confusion as you can hardly fancy. All the lockfast places had been broken open in quest of the chart.

“I make it a point of honour not to lose a man for King George (God bless him!) and the gallows.” The rogues looked at each other but swallowed the home-thrust in silence.

The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me.

I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution

‘That is just what I was about to venture to propose,’returned the doctor with a smite. But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below.

This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.

The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity.

As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror.

He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.

Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.

All day the breeze held in the same point, and rather freshened than died down; and towards afternoon, a swell began to set in from round the outer Hebrides.

["]My life is a bit driegh," says he, pouring out the brandy; "I see little company, and sit and twirl my thumbs, and mind upon a great day that is gone by, and weary for another great day that we all hope will be upon the road. And so here's a toast to ye: The Restoration!"

I had been dead-heavy before, and now I felt a kind of dreadful lightness, which would not suffer me to walk. I drifted like a gossamer; the ground seemed to me a cloud, the hills a feather-weight, the air to have a current, like a running burn, which carried me to and fro.

As it was, the whole family loved it, and the Doctor was never better inspired than when he narrated its imaginary story and drew the character of its successive masters, from the Hebrew merchant who had re-edified its walls after the sack of the town, and past the mysterious engraver of the runes, down to the long-headed, dirty-handed boor from whom he had himself acquired it at a ruinous expense.

At mankind's feast, I take my place / In solemn, sanctimonious state, / And have the air of saying grace / While I defile the dinner plate.

Iron-bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages.

Aweel, Wully was an unco praying kind o' man; a dreigh body, nane o' my kind, I never could abide the sight o' him; […]

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose; and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides.

The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.