I hate solitude, but I’m afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
Yes, of course, there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It’s really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like “pass the gravy” is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people’s imperfection.
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.
I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.
It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day.
Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
An experience is richest not talked of.
Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise.
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature.
I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.
Let me sleep at last. I’ve had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I’ve had misery enough in my life.
You don’t understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You’re like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don’t look –.