She said she sometimes worked as an usherette in the cinema, and she had seemed to him like a nymph of the cinema age, a sybil of the cavern of illusory love.
For the moment however behold me sitting with Priscilla and Francis. A domestic interior. It is about ten o’clock in the evening and the curtains are drawn.
Everything is full of gods, ’ cousin James once said, quoting somebody.
Their hands touched, their knees touched. They were both trembling.
She did not understand music and it upset her, it had only sad, tragic things to say. These leaping forms, these pursuits and insistences, these elusive desperate repetitions, always seemed to her like one long cry of agony. She could not, in this company, allow herself the luxury of self-pitying tears, which was her highest tribute to the art. She looked about her and let the music gather to her the people with whom she was so deeply concerned.
The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. The short path is the only path but it is very steep.
My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?
I can’t see how anything can ever happen to us – I mean, I feel as if, if we leave this place, we shall crumble to pieces.
There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind.
It had been his fate not to be interested in anything except everything.
Adelaide had anticipated pains and difficulties in her married life, and her anticipations were fulfilled.
Life can be sudden.
The easiest thing to think was that he was going to die. This was not exactly an intent to commit suicide, though he did consider suicide, it was rather a sense of the impossibility of surviving much longer, whatever he did, whatever he chose. He felt rent apart by an unremitting mental, felt as physical, strain. When he was alone he groaned aloud.
Society conspires to make a newly wed couple feel virtuous. Marriage is a symbol of goodness, though it is only a symbol.
A marriage is a very secret place.
She had not even framed the idea of happiness in connection with her marriage.
Agamemnon was killed on his first night home from Troy. But Agamemnon was guilty, guilty.
What emotion had so invaded me? Fear? It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers. The naming of it is sometimes unimportant, sometimes crucial.
Moy thought, I shall make no more masks, something is over forever. Anyway, she thought, this time next year I shall probably be dead.
You can’t go through the looking-glass without getting cut. You know that now, don’t you?