I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
How could he ever sleep, in such a roar of silence, how could he forgo a conscious moment of the bliss of solitude? He stretched arms and legs to all points of the compass and fell asleep almost immed...
His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with sil...
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.
He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the ma...
Everybody's possibilities solidify round them and become limitations.
Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book...
Being as I am both a woman and working-class, choice don’t come into it, much, for me. I do what I must. Charles/Karl wanted to say he was sorry, and couldn’t.I imagine you don’t talk to many of us, a...
Ash liked his characters at or over the edge of madness, constructing systems of belief and survival from the fragments of experience available to them.
Ah, said Florence, grimly. A woman has to be extraordinary, she can’t just do things as though she had a right. You have to get better marks than the Senior Wrangler, and still you can’t have a degree...
You do not seem aware, for all of your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen--let alone as in our case, the *hypothetick* produc...
You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.
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.
UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters’ education as seriously as his sons’. Humphry said that Dorothy—and Griselda—were s...
Too much meaning is bad at Toussaint.Reason must sleep, said Christabel. The stories come before the meanings, I said. As I said, reason must sleep, she said again. I do not believe all these explanat...
To a dusty shelf we aspire.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and no...
There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
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.
The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the wo...