A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.
I just hope – if he does come – it won’t be some sort of horror show.
Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.
He felt himself falling into a state, very common when he was younger, of being totally cut off from the society he was in.
We’re just living on our emotions and eating each other.
There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhaps”freedom” has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us.
Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.
The virtues have secret names: they are, so difficult of access, secret things. Everything that is worthy is secret.
How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.
I said, “Your brother is in bed with my wife.” I added, “I just took them up some wine in bed.
I must proceed to my next mystery and for the moment forget this one completely.
Oh what a mad business, no good can come of it, only chaos, and not just chaos but evil. How did we gradually get entangled in such a terribly dangerous shambles!
Or was some act of revenge still pending, some thunderbolt long cherished and prepared?
Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.
Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.
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.