Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives.
But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything.
I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.
And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea.
And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outline of things.
I do not pray. I revenge myself upon the day.
Modern women are frustrated and angry, their experience is limited; modern men are obsessed with the letter “I”; their writing is full of self-conscious indecency, self-conscious virility. It is essentially sterile.
However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon.
What we have to do now, then, Sir, is to lay your request before the daughters of educated men and to ask them to help you to prevent war, not by advising their brothers how they shall protect culture and intellectual liberty, but simply by reading and writing their own tongue in such a way as to protect those rather abstract goddesses themselves.
I put my bare hand on her bare hand and felt, “This is genuine. There can be no mistake about this.
Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years – ” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure – ” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.
To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were silent they were keenly conscious of each other’s presence, and yet words were either too trivial or too large.
They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.
She had made him think he could do anything. Nobody else took him seriously. But she made him believe that he could do whatever he wanted.
I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.
Doesn’t it make you melancholy – looking at the stars?
And then she looked up and saw Flush. Something unusual in his look must have struck her. She paused. She laid down her pen. Once he had roused her with a kiss, and she thought that he was Pan. He had eaten chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. He had given up the sunshine for her sake. She called him to her and said she forgave him.
I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.
Some historians say that when the Carthaginians landed in Spain the common soldiers shouted with one accord “Span! Span!” – for rabbits darted from every scrub, from every bush. The land was alive with rabbits. And Span in the Carthaginian tongue signifies Rabbit. Thus the land was called Hispania, or Rabbit-land, and the dogs, which were almost instantly perceived in full pursuit of the rabbits, were called Spaniels or rabbit dogs.