With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes consolation in the end.
How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. How offensive it can be, the natural instinctive showing off of decent happy people.
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too.
The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe.
I was brimming with anger and hatred. I hated, not society, puny sociologists’ abstraction, I hated the universe. I wanted to cause it pain in return for the pain it caused me.
I liked to live in other people’s worlds and have none of my own.
Love can end. That’s just one of the horrors of human life.
To be good is just never to lose it. How does evil begin in a life? How can it begin? Yet we were there once.
Well, everything’s nicer when you can think about Christmas.
We did not exist all that much. We could suffer like mad all the same. Something was there, a wounded complex of resentment and anxiety and pain, something half crushed, something swallowed, not yet digested, and still screaming.
Everything is full of gods.
How strange that behind a smiling chattering mask one may rehearse in the utmost detail pictures and conversations which constitute torture, that behind that mask one may weep, one may howl.
I do wish you could be happy. If I thought you could be happy I could simply cease to exist with a sigh of joy.
We’ve all got things to cry about. Don’t you think I could drown the world with tears if I started on my own woes?
Perhaps ‘love’ had always been for me an ignis fatuus.
We’re all sinners. We all hurt each other just by existing.
There may be no God, but there’s decency and – and there’s truth and trying to stay there, I mean to stay in it, in its sort of light, and trying to do a good thing and to hold onto what you know to be a good thing even if it seems stupid when you come to do it.
I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.
There had been anguish, fear, indecision, then gradually the brightness of her presence cast beforehand, obliterating all else. Then I was with her and there was strange blankness, and utter calm of delight. Suddenly, down into the furthest crannies of being all was well. It was all so strangely simple too, with a blameless simplicity as of childhood.
Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.