Why don’t we stay in love that way all our lives? Why do we turn into corpses with consciousness?
He went down again into the darkness and seclusion of the wood. But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it. A man could no longer be private and withdrawn. The world allows no hermits.
He doesn’t have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings.
Her eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.
It was like something lurking in the darkness within him... There is remained in the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being silent.
But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.
Lads learn nothing nowadays, but how to recite poetry and play the fiddle.
It was such peace and heavenly freedom, just to fold her and kiss her gently, and not to have any thoughts or any desires or any will, just to be still with her, to be perfectly still and together, in a peace that was not sleep, but content in bliss. To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness.
She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.
There’s a bad time coming, boys, there’s a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses.
She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.
And she had discovered him, discovered in him a rare potentiality, discovered his loneliness.
The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from the battle of life.
But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.
Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart-burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness.
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.
This is why we cannot love in the common sense. Somehow with you I cannot long be trivial, and, you know, to be always beyond this mortal state would be to lose it.
A terrible hollow seemed to menace him somewhere, somehow, a void, and into this void his energy would collapse. Energyless, he felt at times he was dead, really dead.
Don’t ask me anything about the future,” he said miserably. “I don’t know anything. Be with me now, will you, no matter what it is?” And she took him in her arms.
She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously – she must never be serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won’t give herself away – she’s always on the defensive. That’s what I can’t stand about her type.