While Norah described to me her plans for carpets and curtains, or showed me the sample of bedspread material she had hung over a chair to see if she could live with it. When I began to know her, I wo...
I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.
At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities; exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.
I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.
Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and the she was bound to Dora.
That alas is the way it goes; Something we must rectify. Paul, not Caro, would interpret the degree of meaning in their respective lots. That had been decided, as he sat speaking intimately of his lif...
Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided. [p. 74]
I see that you are highly defensive. . . .Caro said, I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.
They lived under supervision, a life without men. Dora knew no men. You could scarcely see how she might meet one, let alone come to know.
Occasion revived an illusion of discovery, as if one woke in a strange room to wonder afresh not only where but who one was; to shed assumptions, even certainties.
My need of your words: for such closeness there should be a word beyond love.Helen, to Leith, in The Great Fire
But that's a way to go on loving--a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love. [p. 56]
We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars - name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual a...
. . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7]
Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.
Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown...
She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those w...
Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases -- 'I fail to understand...', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook...', 'Tolerance is all very well...
She was coming to look on men and women as fellow survivors; well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or just put to use their own destruction. Of th...
Yet her physical beauty was as strong a part of her character ... Its first and lasting impression was one of vitality and endurance. That is to say, of power: a power as self-contained, as unoppressi...
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