We are a Faustian generation, my dear--we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know.
There were all sorts of small canals and cuts and runnels to be crossed. There were trees that had been shaped by steady blasts of wind, stunted and reaching sideways. Philip wanted to draw them. They...
Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves...
She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the...
Literary critics make natural detectives.
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
And Swedenborg himself saw birds during his sojourns in the Spirit World and it was revealed to him that — in the Grand Man — rational concepts are seen as birds. Because the head corresponds to the h...
it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mould...
You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.
What is it my dear?Ah, how can we bear it?Bear what?This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?We can be quiet together, and pretend - since it is only the beginning - that we have all...
To a dusty shelf we aspire.
The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.
No two faces are the same; this endless human diversity is one of the more hopeful things about the preponderant species on the planet.
Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness.Impotence, said Maud, leani...
I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest—I love you for yourself alone—I love you essentially—and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by you ess...
I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither,
I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go a...
He had said she was provocative; so she was, she needed to prove she was there to be seen; but the proof always, contradictorily, drove her to further uncertain agony of guilt and self-distaste.