That was the worst of growing up, she thought; they couldn’t share things as they used to share them.
I will write,” she had said, “what I enjoy writing.
Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid. Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore.
I can’t imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music –.
If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable.
It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers where falling all over England.
Yes, but I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept the sequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the rhythm of my mind by stopping, by looking; I will walk.
But the room was empty. The fire was still blazing; the chairs, drawn out in a circle, still seemed to hold the skeleton of the party in their empty arms.
The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with plants on barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern.
Il gusto per i libri era nato presto in lui. Fanciullo, un paggio lo trovava talvolta a mezzanotte ancora intento a leggere. Gli toglievano il candelabro, ed egli allevava delle lucciole per sostituirlo. Gli toglievano le lucciole, ed egli per poco non metteva a fuoco la casa con una esca. Per dirla in nuce, lasciando al novelliere la cura di spianar le infinite pieghe della seta delle nostre anime, Orlando era un aristocratico malato d’amore per la letteratura.
Naturally, Miss Barrett was better; of course she could walk. Flush himself felt that it was impossible to lie still. Old longings revived; a new restlessness possessed him. Even his sleep was full of dreams. He dreamt as he had not dreamt since the old days at Three Mile Cross – of hares starting from the long grass;.
Thus Arabel at once “began to comfort me by showing how certain it was that I should recover him for ten pounds at most.” Ten pounds, it was reckoned, was about the price that Mr. Taylor would ask for a cocker spaniel. Mr. Taylor was the head of the gang. As soon as a lady in Wimpole Street lost her dog she went to Mr. Taylor; he named his price, and it was paid; or if not, a brown paper parcel was delivered in Wimpole Street a few days later containing the head and paws of the dog.
What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then.
Old age must have endless avenues, stretching away and away down its darkness, she supposed, and now one door opened and then another.
If anyone could have saved me it would have been you.
What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.
The red setter who had been whining all night beside Flush on the floor was hauled off by a ruffian in a moleskin vest – to what fate? Was it better to be killed or to stay here? Which was worse – this life or that death?
With dispassionate despair, with entire disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends’ lives, and those fabulous presences, men with brooms, women writing, the willow tree by the river – clouds and phantoms made of dust too, of dust that changed, as clouds lose and gain and take gold or red and lose their summits and billow this way and that, mutable, vain.
It is true that each visit began, continued, or concluded with a declaration of love, but in between there was much room for silence.
I knew my cases and my genders; I could know everything in the world if I wished.