This now-ness is the only reality we know; it follows the colored nothingness of the no-longer and precedes the absolute nothingness of the future. Thus, in a quite literal sense, we may say that conscious human life lasts always only one moment, for at any moment of deliberate attention to our own flow of consciousness we cannot know if that moment will be followed by another.
Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time;.
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?
In which portrayed events forever stay. I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.
I will create a brand new god and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope.
Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people...
The cell was filled to the ceiling with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments.
I have in my head many projects that were begun and interrupted at various times... I simply shall not pursue them if the time remaining before my execution is not sufficient for their ordelry conclusion.
Cincinnatus, after passing many other doors, stumbled, hopped, and found himself in a small courtyard, filled with various parts of the dismantled moon.
Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care. My heart was a hysterical, unreliable organ.
I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended.
Darkness and silence merged completely.
Fragments of these speeches, in which the words ‘translucence’ and ‘opacity’ rose and burst like bubbles, now sounded in Cincinnatus’s ears, and the rush of blood became applause.
But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, “Yesterday there would have been enough times” – and again you think, “If only I had begun yesterday...
Blunders, gropings, disappointment; surely the Cupid serving him was left-handed, with a weak chin and no imagination. And alongside these feeble romances there had been hundreds of girls of whom he had dreamed but whom he had never got to know; they had just slid past him, leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing quite impossible to capture.
Her love was of the lily variety.
The past was safe in its cage. Why not have a look?
He could not even see the bluish glimmer of a window or those faint patches of light which come to stay with the walls at night.