Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat’s; or she purred.
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook – a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
I will achieve in my life – Heaven grant that it be not long – some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then – our friends are not able to finish their stories.
Our friends – how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.