Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.
Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.
Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel’s Evolution in the History of Literature.
By the way, did she ever tell you how Charlie Holmes debauched there his mother’s little charges.
And what I say is not it, not quite it, and I am getting mixed up, getting nowhere, talking nonsense, and the more I move about and search in the water where I grope on the sandy bottom for a glimmer I have glimpsed, the muddier the water grows, and the less likely it becomes that I shall grasp it.
He wants everything to be so simple – as, alas, it never is in real life!
I do not know the words I must choose to make you understand why I was so tormented. Such words do not come in the small size that fits your everyday needs.
I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze.
I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her.
The greater part of him was in a quite different place, while only an insignificant portion of it was wandering, perplexed.
I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What had begun as a delicious distention of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life.
Or is this all but obsolete romantic rot, Cincinnatus?
What stopped me was the awful feeling that if I meddled with fate in any way and tried to rationalize her fantastic gift, that gift would be snatched away like that palace on the mountain top in the Oriental tale which vanished whenever a prospective owner asked its custodian how come a strip of sunset sky was clearly visible from afar between black rock and foundation.
Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas.
The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave’, as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.
I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard’s wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse.
To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling – oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss.
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too.
One Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before – at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.
I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.