He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
We insist, it seems, on living.
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
I feel certain that I’m going mad again, I feel we can’t go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices.
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets!
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
I have had my vision.
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre.
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.