My hand is very tired but I want to go on writing. I keep resting and thinking. All day I have been two people – the me imprisoned in yesterday and the me out here on the mound; and now there is a third me trying to get in – the me in what is going to happen next.
I have noticed that rooms which are extra clean feel extra cold.
Time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty.
Well, my paper has asked me to do a series: Lives of the Great Musicians, reading time 2 minutes.
Wakings are the worst times – almost before my eyes are open a great weight seems to roll on my heart.
Perhaps it would really be rather dull to be married and settled for life. Liar! It would be heaven.
There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.
And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them – like ’em better sometimes.
Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency.
It’s a beautiful sight to see good dancers doing simple steps. It’s a painful sight to see beginners doing complicated patterns.
It is the still, yellow kind of afternoon when one is apt to get stuck in a dream if one sits very quiet.
Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.
You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it’s a lovely rest.
Once I really looked at the sky, I wanted to go on looking; it seemed to draw me towards it and make me listen hard, though there was nothing to listen to, not so much as a twig was stirring.
We lose more women to marriage than war, famine, and disease.
Another great luxury is letting myself cry – I always feel marvellously peaceful after that. But it is difficult to arrange times for it, as my face takes so long to recover; it isn’t safe in the mornings if I am to look normal when I meeter father at lunch, and the afternoons are no better, as Thomas is home by five. It would be all right in bed at night but such a waste, as that is my happiest time. Days when father goes over to read in the Scoatney library are good crying days.
Sacrifice is the secret – you have to sacrifice things for art and it’s the same with religion; and then the sacrifice turns out to be a gain.” Then I got confused and I couldn’t hold on to what I meant – until Miss Blossom remarked: “Nonsense, duckie – it’s perfectly simple. You lose yourself in something beyond yourself and it’s a lovely rest.
And suddenly all the puppies were her puppies; she was their mother – just as Pongo had felt he was their father.
Oh, I have just had an idea – after tea I shall attack myself with sandpaper.
I really am just as discontented, but I don’t seem to notice it so much.