I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds.
When you love me, it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am.
As if I’d lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I’d done was to see his real face by it.
The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.
He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.
The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped. Obscurer, but no less strong, was the feeling that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won.
I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.
Love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.
You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don’t you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don’t care.
You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight – and smile at your own past sorrows.
He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.
The truth was she couldn’t do ugly things. She was too beautiful.
But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.
Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way – they don’t mind that. It even excites them. But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way.
Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible bad form.
One writes things and the implications shriek- it’s like suddenly realizing one’s deaf.
Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism.
I’m Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.
It was not the mask I was afraid of... but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.