The sound of the chorus came across the water and I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people’s voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire.
Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind’s passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty – it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life – froze it.
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
No, I’m not clever. I’ve always cared more for people than for ideas.