Now I am steel-set: I follow the call to the clear radiance and glow of the heights.
If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.
Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.
Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.
There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying in the knowledge that a husband or wife has forgiven the other freely, and from the heart.
I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority.
Ive had the best possible chance of learning that what the working-classes really need is to be allowed some part in the direction of public affairs, Doctorto develop their abilities, their understanding and their self-respect.
To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.
Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa’s doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.
You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you – or else I pretended to. I am really not quite sure which – I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other.
It is the small losses in life that cut one to the heart.
You have made an empty place within me; and I must try to fill it up with something – with something that is a little like love.
The right? Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don’t have any power?
Good god, people don’t do such things!
When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls.
Both agree in repudiating “marriage for love”; but the idealist repudiates it in the name of love, the critic in the name of marriage. Love, for the idealist Ibsen, is a passion which loses its virtue when it reaches its goal, which inspires only while it aspires, and flags bewildered when it attains. Marriage, for the critic Ibsen, is an institution beset with pitfalls into which those are surest to step who enter it blinded with love.
Not in that sense. What I need is the companionship of another person who can, as it were, complete me – supply what is wanting in me – be one with me in all my striving. MAIA.
PROFESSOR RUBEK. Well, they are trifles, perhaps; but at any rate the time passes for us in that way as well as another, Maia.
As soon as your fear was over – and it was not fear for what threatened me, but for what might happen to you – when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in future treat with doubly gentle care, because it was so brittle and fragile.
He is suffering from an acute attack of integrity.