The cheers died away in the soft grey air. He was alone. He was happy and free; but he would not be anyway proud with Father Dolan. He would be very quiet and obedient: and he wished that he could do something kind for him to show him that he was not proud.
Father Bernard Vaughan’s sermon first. Christ or Pilate? Christ, but don’t keep us all night over it.
Alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.
He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.
O, you poor fellow! Out there in the rain all that time! I forgot that.
Our end is the acquisition of knowledge.
Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences.
I believe you’re a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual.
The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen’s heart. All that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest: but the quiet glow of evening showed him in their faces no sign of rancour.
I admire the mind of man independent of all religions.
Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?
Let there be fight? And there was.
The bright stars fade. A voiceless song sang from within, singing: the morn is breaking.
And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all.
I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester.
Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.
It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early.
Nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!
Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self.