Marvelous are the innocent.
Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins – of happiness and unhappiness.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them.
One must love everything.
There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.
But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.
Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?
She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.
Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?
In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.
The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.
It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.
In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.
The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.