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 –.
Anywhere is dangerous if you carry danger with you.
Your infatuation will end in tears.
Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.
To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate.
They really wanted to remain always in their own house and their own garden. There are such people.