For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy.
Then she turned westward, to gaze at the swirling gold. Just where the river rounded the hill the sun caught it. Fairyland must lie above the bend, and its precious liquid was pouring towards them past Charles’s bathing shed.
O for the night that was ending, for the sleep and the wakefulness, the toughness and tenderness mixed, the sweet temper, the safety in darkness. Would such a night ever return?
A happy ending was imperative.
At my age one’s seldom amazed,” he said, smiling. “Marriage is too absurd in any case. It begins and continues for such very slight reasons. The social business props it up on one side, and the theological business on the other, but neither of them are marriage, are they? I’ve friends who can’t remember why they married, no more can their wives. I suspect that it mostly happens haphazard, though afterwards various noble reasons are invented. About marriage I am cynical.
You, who have just crossed the Roof of the World, will not want to hear an account of the little hills that I saw – low, colorless hills. But to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep – perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams.
She was like a woman of Leonardo Da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.
Anyone can find places, but the finding of people is a gift from God.
With his head on the fender and all his limbs relaxed, he felt almost as safe as he felt once when his mother killed a ghost in the passage by carrying him through it in her arms. There was no ghost now; he was frightened at reality; he was frightened at the splendors and horrors of the world.
She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors – Light.
The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.
He was inaccurate because he was sensitive.
Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.
As is Man to the Universe, so was the mind of Mr. Wilcox to the minds of some men – a concentrated light upon a tiny spot, a little Ten Minutes moving self-contained through its appointed years. No Pagan he, who lives for the Now, and may be wiser than all philosophers. He lived for the five minutes that have past, and the five to come; he had the business mind.
I think he is nice and tiresome. I differ from him on almost every point of any importance, and so, I expect – I may say I hope – you will differ. But his is a type one disagrees with rather than deplores. When he first came here he not unnaturally put people’s backs up. He has no tact and no manners – I don’t mean by that that he has bad manners – and he will not keep his opinions to himself.
Things that are indelicate can sometimes be beautiful.
At Oxford he learned that the importance of human beings has been vastly over rated by specialists.
But he saw only dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.
Vagueness spurred him into knight errantry.
Travel was a species of warfare.