I can’t tell you how piercingly and endlessly I think about you.
My position is quite simple. If the house is on fire one does not ask first who is to be blamed for the conflagration; one puts it out. My heart is afire.
The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.
Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in that underworld of waters were the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shine half transparent enveloped in a green cloak.
Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.
I will cut adrift – I will sit on pavements and drink coffee – I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim – this fine October.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.
I had tea. I then spent a long time in a bookshop. A quiet evening.
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?
I am growing up. I am losing some illusions, perhaps to acquire others.
Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.
She did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations.
It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green.
I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live,” Jacob wrote to Bonamy. “It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself from civilization.
You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it’s being in delusion.
Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table-nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear.
But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories.
I was thinking today of my greatest happiness, a walk along a cliff by the sea, and you at the end of it.
When the wolf walks by you, you will remember.
And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing for people who did not share it; to Mr. Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessions disappear, and clutch at them vanishing.