The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.
It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man’s body,” she continued, “when every man is born of woman. What impudence men have, what arrogance!
Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.
There’s so much of you here with me, really, that it’s a pity you aren’t all here.
He resented the intrusion, he cherished his solitude as his only and last freedom in life.
A woman could take a man without really giving herself away.
She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
You, and rule!” she said. “You don’t rule, don’t flatter yourself. You have only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a week, or threaten them with starvation.
It seems to me a wrong and bitter thing to do, to bring a child into this world.
And these were the happy moments of her life now, when the children included the father in her heart.
The physical sense of injustice is a dangerous feeling, once it is awakened. It must have outlet, or it eats away the one in whom it is aroused.
Apparently one grows more carnal and more mortal as one grows older. Only youth has a taste of immortality –.
With the English, nothing could save him from being the eternal outsider, not even love.
Make him stop drinking’. He prayed every night. ” ‘Lord, let my father die’, he prayed very often. ‘Let him not be killed at pit’“, he prayed when, after tea, the father did not come home from work.
Paul walked with something screwed up tight inside him. He would have suffered much physical pain rather than this unreasonable suffering at being exposed to strangers.
Connie was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so weird to her. A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always “in the pit.
Non fidatevi mai dell’artista. Fidatevi del racconto.
Men don’t think, high and low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted.
He had a sense of foreboding. No sense of wrong or sin; he was troubled by no conscience in that respect. He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.
But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city’s gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly. THE END.