By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing.
If one didn’t feel that politics are an elaborate game got up to keep a pack of men trained for that sport in condition, one might be dismal; one sometimes is dismal; sometimes I try to worry out what some of the phrases we’re ruled by mean. I doubt whether most people even do that. Liberty, for instance.
I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me, they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces.
So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest.
But it was summer now. She had been waked by the birds. How they sang! attacking the dawn like so many choir boys attacking an iced cake.
They had always this queer power of communicating without words. She.
Under the microscope you clearly perceive that these insects have organs, orifices, excrement; they do, most emphatically, copulate. Escorted on the one side by the Bot or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss Ormond advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never did her features show more sublime than when lit up by the candour of her avowal. “This is excrement; these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative organs of the male. I’ve proved it.
It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.
There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision.
In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river.
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.
The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante.
Murmuring London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held, holding which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching to Canada, and those good fellows walking across London, that territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet, Mayfair.
There are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant then among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is!
Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are a very inferior form of fiction.
Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of the living?
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.
The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away, without definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would be seen that such months or years had a character unlike others.
Everything is moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter.
Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away, these moments; there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the British Museum one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this ambulance; and life and death.