Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?
How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.
To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.
They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.
The human frame being what it is, heart, body, and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all.
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.