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...
Balzac's cynicism was always nevertheless romantic - such greed, such gusto. 'Le dégoût, c'est voir juste. Après la possession, l'amour voit juste chez les hommes.' Why should that be so? Why was disg...
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.
Много по-късно той се събуди в просъница и реши, че чува морето, което от тази стая не беше невъзможно, но после осъзна, че тя безшумно хлипа. Протегна ръка и тя несръчно притисна лице във врата му -...
You are a born storyteller, said the old lady. You had the sense to see you were caught in a story, and the sense to see that you could change it to another one.
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...
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...
The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life...
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...
The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither do...
Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone's primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this i...
She was a thinking child, and worked this out. It hurt her, unlike most knowledge, which was strength and pleasure.
She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she...
She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of p...
She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature—at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry ou...
Pomona’s Tom’s age and lucky enough to be as pretty as her name—so dangerous, don’t you think, giving romantic names to little scraps who may grow up as plain as doorposts.
Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hou...
Julian expected to be full of love and lust, and consequently usually was. He had an inconvenient habit of watching himself from a distance, and wondering whether the love and lust were strained and f...