Knitting is the saving of life.
Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the waste-paper basket and forget all about it.
In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted.
And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here – the sonnet.
All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the clifftop but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made.
By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing.
If one didn’t feel that politics are an elaborate game got up to keep a pack of men trained for that sport in condition, one might be dismal; one sometimes is dismal; sometimes I try to worry out what some of the phrases we’re ruled by mean. I doubt whether most people even do that. Liberty, for instance.
I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me, they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces.
So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest.
But it was summer now. She had been waked by the birds. How they sang! attacking the dawn like so many choir boys attacking an iced cake.
They had always this queer power of communicating without words. She.
Under the microscope you clearly perceive that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by the Bot or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss Ormond advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never did her features show more sublime than when lit up by the candour of her avowal. “This is excrement; these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative organs of the male. I’ve proved it.
It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.
There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision.
In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river.
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.
The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante.
Murmuring London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held, holding which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching to Canada, and those good fellows walking across London, that territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet, Mayfair.
There are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant then among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is!
Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of fiction.