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.
All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.
I need love, I’ve never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.
Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so much society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows.
And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.
He did not touch her but enjoyed the particular intimate pain of the tension between them.