Everyone says how wonderful it is to be young. I’ve never seen it.
All this had happened before, perhaps a million times, and because of this was doomed. There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented terrified present. The future had passed through the present like a sword. We were already, even eye to eye and lip to lip, deep in the horrors to come.
It was odd, the life one lived in other people’s dreams.
By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.
Moy felt something snap inside her as if her heart had snapped. The heart-string, she thought – what is the heart-string?
Sometimes he felt like a victim constantly revived in order to suffer more.
Well, it’s such an adventure we shall talk about it forever!
The young are self-satisfied really and utterly ruthless.
I am not a very nice character. You must get to know me some time.
Her short straight oily hair, a lustrous black, sat like a cropped wig about her pale rather waxen Jewish face.
Look Moy, see the chimneys, they’ve lit all the fires, they must have known we were going to try to drown ourselves. And Anax is running on ahead to bring the news.
Henry’s joy left him abruptly and he began anxiously to think about himself.
But her heart was hurting her with its violence.
What a mystery a marriage was. What a strange and violent world, the world of matrimony. I was glad to be outside it. The idea of it filled me with a sort of queasy pity.
Coming events do cast shadows.
And could it be true without other awful things being true as well?
She had the instinctive generosity of the thoroughly lucky person.
I think one should pay so much attention to technique, don’t you? Like learning to draw before you paint.
Can one, in such a self-portrait, omit something which affected one’s whole being and which one has thought of every day of one’s life? ‘Every day’ exaggerates, but not much. I do not need to ‘recall’ Hartley, she is here. She is my end and my beginning, she is alpha and omega.
The past is gone, it doesn’t exist any more.