How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?
Only stories and magic really endure.
As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.
It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another.
We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.
He had lived a chaste life really. It was his accusers and not his crimes which troubled him.
He could feel the pain of her heart beating strongly against his own.
Ludens experienced, as an extra pain, an intimation of the happiness he might have felt in such a place.
A less courageous person would have felt that it was too late, they would have felt ashamed, they would think wellI don’t want this, I know I shall hate it, it’s all wrong, but I’m so involved now I’ll have to put up with it, and I know that later on I’ll keep on wishing that I’d had the nerve to say no, even at the last minute...
Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest.
His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.
No good would come of all these fine intentions.
Was this strange mode of life to go on and on?
He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way.
Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved.
Any society contains propaganda, but it is important to distinguish this from art and to preserve the purity and independence of the practice of art. A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.
If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.
Now she did not even wish to try, for fear of rousing up something terrible.
I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy.