You’re such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You’re a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.
But these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel ‘I shall never know’.
Had he gone eagerly to that rendezvous and was he now, in what strange heaven of release, ‘set free’, whatever that might mean?
And even in those seconds, and even as I wondered with anguish whether I would ever see her again, I lived with her in some angelic timeless world of quiet communication and absolute understanding.
Those were the tortures of the night. The tortures of the day consisted in pretending to eat, pretending to play, pretending to be happy, passing the hours, enduring the sympathetic looks and the loving remarks.
Terrible sadness, dread, an agonizing desire for happiness swelled in his heart.
I believe that unfulfilled frustrated people probably spend a lot of their lives in pure fantasy-dreaming. This can I am sure be a great source of consolation though not always harmless.
Louise was a jewel locked away; and after the first ‘if only’ period had passed and Clement had got used to ‘Mrs Anderson’, he felt that his love for her had not faded, but had suffered a sea change into something special and unique, causing a special and unique and much valued, pain.
I must think of him as vanished utterly and gone forever.
Mary held her heart, contracted into a point of agony.
I felt such a stranger there, like a poor lodger. One must be with one’s own people.
A man who’s as sick as Bruno can’t be philosophical.
She felt above all, as a sort of categorical imperative, the desire to set Hannah free, to smash up all her eerie magical surroundings, to let the fresh air in at last; even if the result should be some dreadful suffering.
Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!
They haven’t been standing still in the past.
Everyone says how wonderful it is to be young. I’ve never seen it.
All this had happened before, perhaps a million times, and because of this was doomed. There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented terrified present. The future had passed through the present like a sword. We were already, even eye to eye and lip to lip, deep in the horrors to come.
It was odd, the life one lived in other people’s dreams.
By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.
Moy felt something snap inside her as if her heart had snapped. The heart-string, she thought – what is the heart-string?