She was dressed to go to bed only it was ridiculously early to go to bed. She desired to be unconscious.
But by now anything was better than hope.
We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.
I thought it might make him despair of life, but he has despaired anyway.
We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them.
She thought, perhaps I am simply mad. It will grow worse. That will be my life.
Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as ‘prisoners’.
In a way it does not matter where I am. In another way where I am is fated.
It is unfortunately for us both also the truth that I love you and only you utterly and permanently and to distraction.
To describe one’s character is difficult and not necessarily illuminating. The story which follows will reveal, whether I will or no, what sort of person I am.
There is so much grit in the bottom of the container, almost all our natural preoccupations are low ones, and in most cases the rag-bag of consciousness is only unified by the experience of great art or of intense love. Neither of these was relevant to my messy and absent-minded goings-on.
But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.
Some inner organ would give way, her heart would literally break, if she did not see him soon.
Death contradicts ownership and self.
He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him.
But there are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.
There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shoulder-shrugging casualness committed at last.
He had for many years now been spared the demons, though he was constantly aware of their continued presence. He could hear them, as it were, moving behind the wall. They belonged to him and would doubtless go with him to the grave. His mind too, like David’s, ran irresistibly to the horror.
I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before.
The wound with which she travelled vibrated within her. She thought, I shall never have what I desire. I shall become bitter and defeated and dim, and I shall never really paint, I am a freak, a crippled animal, something to be put down, put to sleep, put out of its misery.