The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, ‘schools’ and ‘movements’ are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.
There is an old American saying ‘He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.
Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.
But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.
No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it.
The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.
Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion.
I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.
The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her – long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn’t heal.
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.
Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.
One last word are you quite quite ure that – well not tomorrow of course and not after tomorrow but – well – some day any day you will not come to live with me I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries if you give me that microscopic hope.
There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.
Feeling a bit nervous, as most people do at the prospect of seeing a doctor, I thought I would buy on my way to him something soothing to prevent an accelerated pulse from misleading credulous science.
But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.