How mysterious night and day are, this endless procession off dark and light... I think such sad thoughts – of people in trouble and afraid, all lonely people all prisoners.
But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.
Oh my life is so awful, it’s just so awful to be me, you don’t know what it’s like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.
Patchway had the enviable countryman’s capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease.
He was glad that he had expressed to her, however blunderingly, what he felt. He was glad that he had held her hand.
But I’ve got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn’t understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I’m mangled in a machine. Even to say it’s my own fault doesn’t mean anything.
But, and especially with Linda’s help, he had decided that, like most other people, he was not made for reality.
Better keep such things decently buried.
Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.
I need daylight. But I wander in the dark.
Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.
Our planet is a freak which we shall destroy by our own wicked senseless activities in the next century. Our history will very soon come to an end. Now that God is dead, we are at last presented with the truth, yes, the truth remains, but it is on a short lead. Anyway, we are nothing and it matters not what we do.
You talk of freedom – I’ve never had it! I’ve been lonely and miserable and in despair, and you want me to consent to all that all over again!
Of course one never knows about other people’s loves, and I would certainly never know about James’s.
He felt misery, loneliness, a terrible need for love.
We may love our chains and our stripes too.
The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.
He was glad she had come; she was for him, as he for her, ‘another place’.
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
I adore your jealousy, especially when it’s so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.