Oh how stupid I am, he said to himself, using words which he had used ever so often since he was a child. At that moment it seemed to him that his life had consisted of one blunder after another, and now aged thirty-one he was well on into the stupidest of all.
Franca breathed the tranquility of the house, yet it was not tranquil, she breathed its goodness, but it was not good.
I have been on the whole a lucky man. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say it now.
She lived in private with her own horror.
How happy are those who believe that they can pray and be helped, or even, without being helped, be listened to.
She thought, I shall never tell it to Jack, the strange love which I feel for this doomed man, as if he were a dog lying in the road with a broken back.
Deep, deepest inside his wounded heart. he felt the new pain, the pain which would now travel with him always.
I can’t believe in your other attachment.
He wished he was not always young again in his dreams, it made waking up so sad.
Who is one’s first love? Who indeed.
How little thought he had given to her since, how little imagination of her feelings – and after the great honour which she had done him. She had offered him herself and said she loved him.
He thought about the future and it was a vibrating darkness. He felt fear.
And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one’s only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one’s partners head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow!
Or did I know by intuition that wonderful and terrible things were really imminent at last, trembling into being just behind the curtain of the future?
I can’t see why anyone would want to go on living when they’ve got like that. Whatever can he look forward to?’ ‘The next drink.’ ‘Well, you would! I think old age is awful. I hope I’ll never be old.
And now in her deep heart an even sharper pain was stirring, a pain which would stay with her always.
Even as I write these words, which should be lucid and filled with glowing colour, I feel the very darkness of my own personality invading my pen. Only perhaps in the ink of this darkness can this writing properly be written? It is not really possible to write like an angel, though some of our near-gods by heaven-inspired trickery sometimes seem to do it.
No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.
Why did I ever leave them, what was I fleeing from? What spoilt scene that I could not then endure?
How little perhaps can words convey except in the hands of a genius.