The school song at Accrington High School for Girls was ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ a terrible choice for an all-girls’ school, but one that helped turn me into a feminist. Where were the famous women – indeed any women – and why weren’t we praising them? I vowed to myself that I would be famous and that I would come back and be praised.
I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do.
Stop thinking,” she said. “The more you think, the faster you cut your own throat.
You are the door at the edge of the world. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.
There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t.
Is it failure for morning to become afternoon?
I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.
I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.
The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart’s desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls.
The planets are bodies in the solar system and so are we. You and I in elliptical orbs circling life. It is life we want, but we daren’t come too close for fear it might burn us away, this life in its intensity.
An ordinary miracle, your body changing under my hands. And yet, how to believe in the obvious surprise? Extraordinary, unlikely that you should want me.
She wanted to kiss the hesitation of his throat.
I’m living on my memories like a cheap has-been.
In Venice, a long time ago, when we had our own calendar and stayed aloof from the world, we began the days at night. What use was the sun to us when our trade and our secrets and our diplomacy depended on darkness? In the dark you are in disguise and this is the city of disguises.
But I tell you, Henri, that every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There’s only now.
I think I may have missed the world, that the one I’ve seen is a decoy to get me off the scent.
When you dig under the surface, past the necessities, men and women don’t mix.
Passion is not such an emotion as a destiny.
De ce masura iubirii este pierderea ei?
Dark could feel the familiar pain behind his eyes. His eyes were bars, and behind them was a fierce, unfed animal. When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.