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.
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.
I am the nonsense priest of the nonsense god!
Since parting company with the priesthood he could almost be said to have become demoralised. Almost, for somehow he remained someone, a slightly mysterious someone, whom they respected, and they gave him the benefit of every doubt.
I’m just one long disappointment.
Cambridge by moonlight was light blue and brownish black. There was no mist here and a great vault of clear stars hung over the city with an intent luxurious brilliance. It was the sort of night when one knows of other galaxies. My long shadow glided before me on the pavement. Although it was not yet eleven o’clock the place seemed empty and I moved through it like a mysterious and lonely harlequin in a painting: like an assassin.
This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence. It’s not the emotional straining and scheming for possession that you used to think it was.