A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood – a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved.
It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious – that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.
But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one’s temper as it is difficult at other times to keep it.
We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity – not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort – not anyone pompous or tearful – were caring for us up in the sky.
I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.
Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.
For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or – to put the thing less cynically – we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. Phillip, at all events, lived more graciously in Italian, the very phrases of which entice one to be happy and kind.
The Waves is an extraordinary achievement... It is trembling on the edge. A little less – and it would lose its poetry. A little more – and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.
He had said it bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.
Rudeness affected Margaret like a bitter taste in the mouth. It poisoned life. At times it is necessary, but woe to those who employ it without due need.
She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars.
And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind – the knowledge that they could never be parted because their love was rooted in common things.
I believed in a return to Nature once. But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her? Today, I believe that we must discover Nature. After many conquests we shall attain simplicity. It is our heritage.
Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled.
Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not.
Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it composed entirely of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars.
He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.
They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.
I am swathed in cant’, she thought, ’and it is good for me to be stripped of it.
In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.