Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
How remorseless life is!
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
It's my choice, to choose how to live my life.
a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.
It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.
But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.
So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.
No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.
I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.
The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
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