Here is Tom Jenkyns, honest and dull, except when he drank too much. It’s true that his wife was a scold, but that was no excuse to kill her. If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.
Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.
I held out my arms to him and he came to me like a child.
Time will mellow it, make it a moment for laughter. But now it was not funny, now I did not laugh. It was not the future, it was the present. It was too vivid and too real.
I have no talent for making new friends, but oh such genius for fidelity to old ones.
I had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.
It wouldn’t make for sanity would it, living with the devil.
How simple life becomes when things like mirrors are forgotten.
Happiness happens when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
And I don’t like books which are full of name dropping.
Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known Freedom to write, to walk, to wander, freedom to climb hills, to pull a boat, to be alone.
Life and death do not wait for legal action.
People who travel are always fugitives.
I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.
You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.
I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.
I felt rather exhausted, and wondered, rather shocked at my callous thought, why old people were sometimes such a strain. Worse than young children or puppies because one had to be polite.
I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes.
When she smiled it was as though she embraced the world.
The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.