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.
There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so – crucial.
I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy.
The unspoken words trembled in the air.
Happiness. What’s that? I don’t know. How can one be happy when one loves a demon?
There was as much emotion generated between them now as if they had been lovers.
She has somehow missed the bus of life.