She tells so many different stories and they are all false.
But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.
Your best friends are in trouble and you say ‘of course’ and forget them instantly.
But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.
Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.
And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.
The best you can hope for is a little peace and not too much remorse. Thoughts at peace under an English heaven.
Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.
I feel so depressed. I have to be merry and bright while I just want to cry.
I can’t tell you – oh I can’t tell you – how awful – how sort of unlivable – everything is now – like a great black wall in front of me – Something’s got to smash.
We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant.
Sometimes one feels suddenly doomed by fate.
You’re doing your thing, why can’t I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it.
The whole extraordinary business was over. And I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold without a coat.
I did not like the look of him at all. Something significantly ill-omened which I could not yet define emanated from him.
We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.
There are special nightmares for the daytime sleeper: little nervous dreams tossed into some brief restless moments of unconsciousness and breaking through the surface of the mind to become confused at once with the horror of some waking vision. Such are these awakenings, like an awakening in the grave, when one opens one’s eyes, stretched out rigid with clenched hands, waiting for some misery to declare itself; but for a long time it lies to suffocation upon the chest and utters no word.
He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.
Sometimes one has got to become monstrous in order to survive.
It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.