In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.
Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair – He took her bag.
Prompted by the sky, which seemed to make it all a little futile – what they said, what they did – she said something perfectly commonplace again.
If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.
We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget.
But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture book had stopped and had said, ‘Look. This is the truth.
With a stranger he felt a renewal of hope because they could not say that he had not done what he had promised, and yielding to his charm would give him a fresh start –.
Gli occhi degli altri sono le nostre prigioni, i loro pensieri le nostre gabbie.
It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid – they looked as if dipped in sea water – the foliage of a submerged city.
Virginia Woolf had to ask herself “How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader’s soul?
And I suppose have only made myself more unpopular: ah yes: but freer. That’s the point.
I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people.
Mrs. Jarvis, as she came out of the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and her Newfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept his tail from side to side.
We love each other,” Terence repeated, searching into her face. Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said nothing. He was afraid to kiss her again. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested against him. In this position they sat for some time. She said “Terence” once; he answered “Rachel.
A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it sank; then another came, more perceptible. Lights slid right across the uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan.
But the noise!” she said. “The noise!” “The sign of a successful party.
With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before.
The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind.
The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.
As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to respond to them in others.