I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.? To live alone?? To live. With what you are.
It’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.
But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you.
Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say ‘I do not know the time’. Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.
Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? What are you drinking? The water or the wave?
The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe – so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.
I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.
If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.
She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.