Sorrow can sometimes induce sleep.
It’s terrible that one doesn’t love people forever.
The calmness was the final tone of despair.
And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over.
How irrevocably spoilt, down to its minutest detail, his world was now. Even the countryside was spoilt, the animals, the birds, the flowers. There was nowhere to run to.
Adelaide cooked a plain dinner since neither Will nor Auntie ever knew what they were eating and Will thought interest in food was bourgeois.
The had met at a party. Falling in love surprised them both.
Over the bed hung the picture of her beloved, the Polish Rider. He was looking, with his authoritative pensive mouth and his calm wide-apart eyes, past Moy, over her left shoulder and away into some vast distance. He was a knight upon a quest. He was brave, innocent, chaste, good.
That love all belonged to the elapsed moment.
She has lost the instinct for happiness.
I don’t like you, I love you. You’re a portent for me, a sign. I’ve always lived by signs.
He thought, I haven’t got much longer before some sort of collapse. He could not think if this would be a collapse of mind or of body. Mind and body seemed utterly fused now in cold aching pain, and darkness.
No! I can’t leave him, I’m bound to him, I’m made of him, I am him!
Her solemn face of a Hebrew angel regarded me, ready, stripped of expression.
The loss of her reason did not seem to have made her unhappy.
If at that moment Clement had caught sight of the dog and had managed to capture him, the fates of a number of people in this story would have been entirely different. Such is the vast play of chance in human lives.
If I could only pray, he thought, if there was only some reservoir of force out of which I could draw something extra.
I’ve somehow run myself into hell. There must be many entrances.
If only it were over, done, without the awful doing of it.
He felt as if something had been completed and he would never see any of those people again.