What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man’s searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand.
I could scarcely believe what I saw and I had the sense as in a nightmare of being involved in something both wildly improbable and relentlessly inevitable. This had to happen. Yet how could it have happened?
Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.
But now her tears dried because so many terrible emotions and speculations demanded her attention.
Even the few whom we genuinely adore we have to belittle secretly now and then, as Toby and I had to belittle James, just to feed the healthy appetite of our wondrously necessary egos.
That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom.
It was a voyage into the absurd.
Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation.
But I wanted to make what was terrible so much worse so as to be sure that it was fatal; like Hartley protecting herself by thinking I must hate her.
Bellamy thought, he is beginning to avoid me, my presence embarrasses him, my problems irritate him. I am becoming an unperson.
We are conditioned beings who salivate when the bell rings. This sheer conditioning is another of our most characteristic dooms. Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world.
Perhaps it was a case of time overflowing.
The only cure here was death. They were both gone out of my life.
Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton’s stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.
I’ll look after you, I’ll go with you anywhere, I won’t ever leave you.
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?
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.