It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer’s mind.
You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.
The agony was of suddenly feeling herself so separate and so secret.
The trouble with people nowadays is they don’t know how to do nothing.
Girls don’t want men to be quiet and gentle, I’m told. If you’re not panting with impatient lust they think you’re not interested.
Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.
He also wanted to destroy something, everything, perhaps himself.
In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide.
I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.
And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.
A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart.
Sometimes I feel I am crammed with demons.
If I see her she may kill hope.
There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage.
Your coldness has ruined my life. All right, you didn’t mean it, all right I was a schoolgirl, but you could have been kinder to someone who said they loved you, you could have been gentle and grateful.
I could not see other human beings at present.
I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.
How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.
He was attentive but impersonal, and esteemed rather than loved.