I knew he was angry by this token. When I read when he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women had he used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result would be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either.
It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw.
I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky.
I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems to me that things are going on at so many different levels simultaneously.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window as they left Newhaven, it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
We are the words; we are the music...
He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be.
But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing – and I believe that they had a very great effect.
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other.
The tiger leapt, and the swallow dipped her wings in dark pools on the other side of the world.
I am suspended between life and death in an unfamiliar way.
I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I suppose, if we had votes, we should, too.” “I.
Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it.
I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline.
That current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people, fighting to defend freedom.
One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself, Oh, but they can’t buy literature too. Literature is open to everybody. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
A wet day. And I am glad of the rain, because I have talked too much.
White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains.
Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet.