His love for Janie was not accessible to memory, he knew it only on evidence.
I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent.
Nothing happened; yet there were disturbing signs and portents.
We think with our body, with its yearnings and its shrinkings and its ghostly walkings.
He felt irritably dissatisfied with himself. Then his old huge familiar misery gradually returned like an old friend.
Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of ‘Help me!’ – but there was no one there.
Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm to no one. I cannot think of any tiny good things to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.
I felt blank dismay, instant fear for myself. I did not want to be involved in any mess of Priscilla’s. I did not even want to have to be sorry for Priscilla.
I did not harbour intelligent doubts about whether Hartley would go on loving me, naturally I knew that she was mine forever. But as we closed our eyes upon tears of joy there was cosmic dread.
And she shivered with a dazzled joy.
It was too late to go to Gaze now, everyone would be in bed. It was a comforting thought. Whatever was happening it was not happening now. There was nothing he could do now. Sleep was overwhelming him again, great clouds and folds of sleep like a warm fog.
The television had been banished with its false sadnesses and its images of war. Perhaps he had nodded off over his book.
Bradley, my marriage is over. I think my life is probably over. What a poor affair it has been.
I have been struck down before my life begins. I have already died in the war.
How can we not be dooms to each other?
There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change and is still and ever with Hartley, in that good place where we once were.
Things which he and she had done and been in years past were having their deep inevitable consequences.
But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his cleverness a ghost, he knew where it was he wanted to lay his head.
But now he was dreaming, he was wildly imagining things.
It was like a comedy by Shakespeare. All the ends of the story were being bound up in a good way.