How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.
You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain... ; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost.
Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate – now advanced to this glory... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased.
Septimus has been working too hard” – that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.
She would not say of anyone that they were this or that.
What’s the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
She didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.
But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below.
Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place.
The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely.
It was a very very nice letter you wrote by the light of the stars at midnight. Always write then, for your heart requires moonlight to deliquesce it. And mine is fried in gaslight, as it is only nine o’clock and I must go to bed at eleven.
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.
There is something absolute in us which despises qualification.
She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said. Alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it- it went on increasing in his experience.
La bellezza del mondo ha due tagli, uno di gioia, l’altro d’angoscia, e taglia in due il cuore.
To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now...
So she sat down to morning tea, like any other old lady with a high nose, thin cheeks, a ring on her finger and the usual trappings of rather shabby but gallant old age...