When one is very close to Truth itself, truthfulness vanishes.
Now let us leave this place, it is rather eerie.
How fearful that dark shadow is when we catch sight of it in the life of another. No wonder those at whom that black arrow is aimed so often turn and flee. How unendurable it can be, the love another bears us. I would never persecute my darling with that dread knowledge. From now onward until the world ended everything must remain, although utterly changed, exactly as it was before.
I must tell her, but later, later, later, when it’s all long finished and no longer an agony.
Understanding was out of the question; and indeed how passionately, just then, I did not want to be understood.
Ducane knew that Willy had looked forward to this visit. He knew too that the visit was rendering Willy unspeakably miserable.
You know when things get inside you and you can’t stop going round and round the same piece of misery.
We must keep this love uncontaminated even if we kill it.
I’ve not often been happy or thought it was in my stars.
There had been a slaughter of all my other interests, and upon the strange white open scene of the future only one thing remained.
I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart.
You understand nothing of – the horror – no wonder you can’t write real books – you don’t see – the horror –.
How had this weird idea been conceived, how had it grown until it seemed inevitable?
Of course she had read this work many times before, but there were certain parts to which she passionately returned: so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible. As she read tears began to stream down her face.
How could two such different worlds co-exist, how could they communicate?
It occurred to me as scandalous that Palmer and Antonia, after the scene in which I had taken part in the drawing-room, should have gone out to the opera. Antonia ought to have been waiting for me to come back. I resented this indifference to the tempo of my own drama.
Charles, don’t destroy yourself,” said James. “Why are you always so intent on breaking everything that surrounds and supports you?
Lucas hated other people, and also hated himself.
I prayed that all might be well between me and Hartley, that somehow that lifelong faithful remembering, what I now thought of as my mystical marriage, might not be lost or wasted, but somehow come to good!
The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.