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.
She had only a candle’s light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman.
A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary’s; it reversed the entire order of nature.
Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.
Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.
That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.
But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else’s imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.