She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.
You know what. You’ve killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don’t come for me, I’ll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.
The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.
She was a spoiler, a needler, an underminer, a diminisher, simply by instinct.
Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.
I have no close friends, that is, no friends.
Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.
Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent or come to doubt their own wit.
What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.
The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.
One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It’s none of our business.
There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.
I’m not young. I’ve never had any youth.
What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?
Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that.
There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave ‘anyhow’ and then expect to resume life where we left off.
Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations.
I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.
Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn’t disapprove of people. It cuts you off.
Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.