A steel-blue plume from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds’ feathers. She had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat.
It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering – the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.
That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife against herself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.
Fight ! Fight! I repeated. It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together. This is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit.
Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break, like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss Kilman standing still in the street for a moment to mutter “It is the flesh.
London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them.
If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her.
That was her feeling – Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!
Mesmo assim, o sol era quente. Mesmo assim, a gente superava as coisas. Mesmo assim, a vida arranjava um jeito de somar um dia ao outro.
But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement.
The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.
How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one’s faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the centre.
It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.
Where does she begin, and where do I end? she thought... On they drove. They were two living people, driving across London; two sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies; and those sparks of life enclosed in two separate bodies are at this moment, she thought, driving past a picture palace. But what is this moment; and what are we?
Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter.
Parties, he said, bored him – such were English aristocrats before marriage with intellect had adulterated the fine singularity of their minds.
We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.
The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work.
The weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry.
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richard – as if one couldn’t know to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a morning!