We must go to Athens.
With: Go Ferchios off to Allad out of this! An oldsteinsong. He threwed his fit up to his aers, rolled his poligone eyes, snivelled from his snose and blew the guff out of his hornypipe.
From the evil seed of lust all other deadly sins had sprung forth: pride in himself and contempt of others, covetousness in using money for the purchase of unlawful pleasures, envy of those whose vices he could not reach to and calumnious murmuring against the pious, gluttonous enjoyment of food, the dull glowering anger amid which he brooded upon his longing, the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had sunk.
I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of the match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives.
We’re as old as we feel, Johnny.
To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing.
Natural parents should bear in mind that the more supplementaries their children find, at school or elsewhere, the better they will know that it takes all sorts to make a world. Also, that though there is always the risk of being corrupted by bad parents, the natural ones may be – probably ten per cent of them actually are – the worst of the lot.
The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures – on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens.
Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about them.
He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
He is a bold man who, in his writing, dares to alter – even further to distort – what he has seen and heard.
Early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically.
Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. they streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes and passed away above him till at last the air was clear and cold again.
He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling about a temple of air.
Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can’t understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn’t he have some spark of manhood about him?
He had tales of distant countries.
The mockery of it! he said gaily.
The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.
A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.
A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. the wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.