The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked round her.
EM Forster never gets any further than warming the tea pot... Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.
Leila was sure ifhe partner didn’t come and she had to listen to that marvellous music and to watch the others sliding, gliding over the golden floor, she would die at least, or faint, or lift her arms and fly out of one of those dark windows that showed the stars.
We are solitary creatures au fond. It hapens so rarely that one feels another understands. But when one does feel it, it’s not only a joy, it’s a help and comfort in dark moments.
Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.
Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can’t build on it it’s only good for wallowing in.
How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you – you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences – like rags and shreds of your very life.
It’s rather nice to think of oneself as a sailor bending over the map of one’s mind and deciding where to go and how to go. The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.
I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future plusses.
I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.
Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
There are always these moments in life when the limits of suffering are reached and we become heroes and heroines.