Come in, defeat, come in and make yourself at home.
I believe in you so much that you must do what I want.
Why can’t you live in the present? You live everywhere but in the present.
In the torpor of the afternoon the remembered road had the slightly menacing and elusive familiarity of a place in a dream when one thinks: I have been here, yet where is it and what is going to happen?
You are heroic, Mr. Lynch-Gibbon. The knight of infinite humiliation. One does not know whether to kiss your feet or to recommend that you have a good analysis.” She said it as one might say “a good thrashing.
And she looked back out of her sallow Jewish mask, the line of her mouth dead straight between the curving lips, the narrow eyes black.
He is endowed with an Irish flow of words, and when thoroughly drunk is difficult to interrupt.
Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea’s a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking.
His sudden decision not to see her any more was utterly incomprehensible to the girl, it was a death sentence from a hidden authority for an unknown crime. Nothing had changed, and then there was suddenly this.
What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air? We both felt its presence.
If the fates were arranging things, it was better to leave it entirely to them.
What I really wanted just then was to put Georgie in cold storage. It is unfortunate that other human beings cannot be conveniently immobilized.
A human being hardly ever thinks about other people.
The flat was small and smelt of ancient things with which Gildas had not contended. In the sitting room shadowy photographs of Italian lakes had been hung high up by a previous tenant.
I know her by intuition as if she were inside my head.
Oh Christ, if I could only have some happiness.
Send anger and hate away. Love them and let them walk on you.
The Hospital was deserted, yet strangely alive. I could hear it purring and murmuring like a sleeping beast, and even when at times there came as it were a wave of silence I could still sense within it its great heart beating.
Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself.
It was dark now. A thin moon was visible, a bright portent, but giving no light.