Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have – what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization – let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses –.
She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.
Bring those parcels,’ he said, nodding his head at the things Nancy had done up for them to take to the Lighthouse. ‘The parcels for the Lighthouse men,’ he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying: ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.
It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful.
The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
Even if fall she must, it was to lie on the earth and moulder sweetly into the roots of violets.
Long years – ” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs.
There is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
The light touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with fine gold wires.
Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen;.
He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn’t, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
Yes, I miss you, I miss you.
But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone.
The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
In her eyes shone the sweetness of melancholy.
I am extremely happy walking on the downs... I like to have space to spread my mind out in.
Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside-headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams-nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.
Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything.