Where do they come from, these tears?
Ordinary consciousness simply becomes pain.
I remained, leaning a little on her shoulder, my cheek touching her crown of golden hair. It was fading into grey. One day, without having noticed the transition, I would see that it was gold no longer.
Her curving Jewish mouth, with its natural red against the yellow tinge of the skin, was fixed in a stiff smile, while the hand moved and moved. She looked very tired.
Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one’s first love?
Was it that he had lived too long in his mind and was tired of the scenery?
We all live in the interstices of each other’s lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.
My first love, and also my only love. All the best, even Clement, have been shadows by comparison. The necessity of this seems, in my own case, so great that I find it hard to imagine that it is not so with everyone.
Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.
Curiously watched by people in neighbouring cars, she abandoned herself to sobbing as the taxi crawled slowly through the north London traffic.
Everyone here seems to have some weird secret or other.
This was everything that I wanted to be done with, the relaxed banality of life without goals.
Talk to him about more ordinary things. It’ll take a bit of time.’ ‘There isn’t much time left, my dear. And no ordinary things. Only last things.
I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way.
Shall I come too?” said Francis. “I might be useful. After all, I am still a doctor in the eyes of God.
And all the time the line of force which bound her to her husband stretched and vibrated so that her heart in secret haemorrhage, gushed blood.
Was it here, after all, that everything broke down and descended into a roaring shaft of shattered masks and crumpled rose petals and bloody feathers?
He had trimmed his moustache into a Hitlerian toothbrush.
Because of what you have done things will happen later which can’t possibly be foreseen.
I must stay with you, stay near you, do your will, or die.