One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred.
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook – a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
I will achieve in my life – Heaven grant that it be not long – some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then – our friends are not able to finish their stories.
Our friends – how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.
The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
Night had come – night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.
I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.
She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.