A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
The realisation of one’s own death is the point at which one becomes adult.
I realized then the truth about all love: that it is an absolute which takes all or forfeits all. The other feelings, compassion, tenderness and so on, exist only on the periphery and belong on the constructions of society and habit. But she herself- austere and merciless Aphrodite-is a pagan. it is not our brains or instincts which she picks-but our very bones.
There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear – if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one’s hold also on one’s own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage.
But that is what islands are for; they are places where different destinies can meet and intersect in the full isolation of time.
Each of our five senses contains an art.
When one is fully extended by day and exhausted every evening one lives differently, without the weight of yesterday or tomorrow on one’s shoulders. I.
Youth is the age of despairs.
She gave me the impression of someone engaged in giving a series of savage caricatures of herself – but this is common to most lonely people who feel that their true self can find no correspondence in another.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will – whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures – and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection...
Love is poetry plus biology.
But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them.
There was some unresolved inner knot which she wished to untie and which was quite beyond my skill as a lover or a friend. Of course. Of course. I knew as much as could be known of the psychopathology of hysteria at that time.
Grapes from this mountain region yield a wine that bubbles ever so slightly; an undertone of sulphur and rock. Ask for red wine at Lakones and they will bring you a glass of volcano’s blood.
This weird translation of feelings into gestures which belied words and words which belied gestures, confused and disoriented her. She needed someone to tell her whether to laugh or to cry.
Is it any wonder that I absent-mindedly take the entrance marked Aliens Only whenever I enter?
Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe – an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past – had already asserted itself as something different: a forbidding darkness where the croaking ravens matched the dry exclamations of spiritless men, and rationed laughter fashioned from breath simply the chattering of baboons. Sometimes they captured someone – a solitary frightened man out hunting hares – and were amazed to see that he was human like themselves.
Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.
A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor.
With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can’t help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. This is an experience no artist ever forgets – the birth cry of a newly born baby of letters, the genuine article.