For Ann, aged two in 1903, a year was half a lifetime. She did not expect the second winter, and then, when it came, vaguely assumed it was eternal, until spring came, and summer came, and she understood that they had come “again” and began to learn to expect.
Julian occasionally thought that enjoying oneself was a very strenuous occupation.
We might do better if we saw art as a technique, not a mystique.
The sea was as black as basalt, covered with churning foam, ice-green, clotted cream, shivering high walls full of needles of air going up and up and crashing down on other walls of water on the crumbling coasts of the world.
She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature – at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead.
On the first occasion Mrs Papagay had met her, there had been a discussion of the process of grief, and Mrs Jesse had nodded sagely, “I know that. I have felt that,′ like a kind of tragic chorus. ‘I have felt everything; I know everything. I don’t want any new emotion. I know what it is to feel like a stoan.
Do you know – the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination.
Now I am not saying – Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker’s imagination nothing can live for us – whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life –.
Are there fish?” “All you can see is imperfections and reflections.
But if there are spirits, I do not see why they are not everywhere, or may not be presumed to be so. You could argue that their voices may well be muffled by solid brick walls and thick plush furnishings and house-proud antimacassars. But the mahogany-polishers and the drapers’ clerks are as much in need of salvation – as much desirous of assurance of a afterlife – as poets or peasants, in the last resort.
So now his love for this woman, known intimately and not at all, was voracious for information.
It is as though our dreams were watching us and directing our lives with external vigour whilst we simply enact their pleasures passively, in a swoon.
Infatti devi sapere che io avevo un fratello gemello, bello come il giorno, e gentile come un cerbiatto, e sano come pane fresco e burro.
He made the analogy, sometimes, almost bitterly, between Harald’s collection of wing-cases and empty ribcages, elephant’s feet and Paradise plumes, and Harald’s interminably circular book on Design, which rambled on from difficulty to difficulty, from momentarily illuminated clearing to prickling thicket of honest doubt.
This agreed – may we not, in some circumscribed way – briefly, perhaps, probably – though it is Love’s Nature to know itself eternal – and in confined spaces too – may we not steal some – I almost wrote small, but it will never be that – some great happiness? We must come to grief and regret anyway – and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities.
And she was angry because she knew she was capable of many things she couldn’t even define to herself, so they seemed like bad dreams – that is what she told me. She told me she was eaten up with unused power and thought she might be a witch – except, she said, if she were a man, these things she thought about would be ordinarily acceptable.
I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem.
Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others.
Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hourglass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference.
It is in the nature of the human frame to tire. Fortunately. Let us collude with necessity. Let us play with it.