She haunted him, as an ungenerous action haunts one.
It is strange how sad it can be – sunlight in the afternoon, don’t you think?
Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary...
It was like letting go and falling back into water and seeing yourself grinning up through the water, your face like a mask, and seeing the bubbles coming up as if you were trying to speak from under the water. And how do you know what it’s like to try to speak from under water when you’re drowned?
When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and that he hated me, and it was funny sitting there and talking like that, knowing he hated me.
And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I’d been afraid for a long time, I’d been afraid for a long time. There’s fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.
The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first?
After all this, what happened? What happened was that, as soon as I had the slightest chance of a place to hide in, I crept into it and hid. Well, sometimes it’s a fine day isn’t it? Sometimes the skies are blue. Sometimes the air is light, easy to breathe. And there is always tomorrow...
She’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.
Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad...
One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.
I want more of this feeling – fire and wings.
Cold – cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.
If all good, respectable people had one face, I’d spit in it.
What you take to be hyprocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine, though ponderous, childish, sometimes a mixture of both.
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know.
Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.
I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.