Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers.
Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.
Good-morning to you, Clarissa!
It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds.
That wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.
At last the door opened stealthily. Ellen, the discreet black maid, stood behind Mrs. Chinnery’s chair, waiting. Mrs. Chinnery pretended to ignore her, but the others were glad to stop. Ellen stepped forward and Mrs. Chinnery, submitting, was wheeled off to the mysterious upper chamber of extreme old age. Her pleasure was over.
He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpling a handful of leaves which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense of pleasure and relief possessed him; it was all so solid and peaceful after the ball at the hotel, whether he was in love with them or not, and he was not in love with them; no, but it was good that they should be alive.
But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other thing, after all, came so much more naturally.
If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world; the sense that comes to me of being bound to a perpetual adventure – of being strangely free to do anything.
Everything he saw was distasteful to him. He hated the blue and white, the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south; the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a sheet painted blue. He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.
Once you stumble... human nature is on you.
The kitchen table was something visionary, austere; something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain.
Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one’s own.
But how describe the world seen without a self?
I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life – behold, death is better. I have known many men and women,” she continued: “none have I understood.
What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.
The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to “hate women,” which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.
Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the youngest, the most naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave... but I... am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one.
The red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.
Her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.