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.
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.