Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders!
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today?
Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.
Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.
It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.
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.