Armed with Madness quotes

In the house, in which they could not afford to live, it was unpleasantly quiet.

Marvellously noisy, but the noises let through silence. The noises were jays, bustling and screeching in the wood, a hay-cutter, clattering and sending up waves of scent, substantial as sea-waves, filling the long rooms as the tide fills a blowhole, but without roar or release.

People who had come for a week had been known to leave next day. The people who had the house were interested in the wood and its silence. When it got worse, after dark or at midday, they said it was tuning-up.

When a gale came up-Channel shrieking like a mad harp, they said they were watching a visible fight with the silence in the wood.

A large gramophone stood with its mouth open on the verandah flags. They had been playing to the wood after lunch, to appease it and to keep their dancing in hand. The house was empty. Their servants had gone over to a distant farm.

“I don’t mind ’em. I always like their women. But take it from me, all we shall get out of this one is some fun.

He won’t like the wood. The wood will giggle at him.

”

Slightly overdoing the beauty business—

Beauty is a too concentrated food.

And what did he mean about luxury? There was a sort of lean splendour about their things, anyhow. Still, his repose and his careful manners flattered her. She wondered when the men would be back, smelling of turf and thyme, and settle him in.

Very sensitive to the arts, he admitted that he soon might be justified in singing that. Lay this body down. What an idea, but he might soon have to do it. To him, straight from London, Paris, and New York, the silence was intolerable.

The wood sighed at him. Just like that.

Two kinds of life he did not want. The ash-fair tree-tall young woman downstairs, and the elaborate piece of leaf and wood, that was one thing and many.

The wood and the woman might be interchangeable, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted on a visit. He had nerves, too, a great sensibility to take impressions. Always in relation to people.

Life to him was an elaborate theatre, without scenery. Here the scenery seemed to be the play.

He got as far as that when he remembered that downstairs there would be certainly something to drink, and began to change, beautifying himself, scrupulously and elaborately as a cat.

She was laughing to herself. Laughing at the stone age. Real, abstract laughter. She had forgotten he was there. That her brother and her friend had disappeared. She might be mad, but she was good-looking.

Women lovely and mad, or only lovely and only mad, should not be left alone in woods.

Literature did not help him. He could only think of La Belle Dame sans merci, and she wasn’t that kind.

She was telling herself: Something has happened, I think. I told myself this morning I’d watch the scene and not try to make it right. My boy friends can go hang.

The silence went away, and left nothing.

There was an iron clang. Carston sat tight.

A good deal was told Carston, casually, about Celts and Saxons and Romans and early Christianity; things completely over so far as he knew—Not that they talked about what he hadn’t heard.

Only they talked as if there was no time, no progress, no morality.

He knew, of course, that there was no progress, and no morality.

“I shouldn’t care myself to know too much about Picus.

Despair’s a bad bedfellow.

”

Scylla said: “

Well, I take it that we have to know everything about being lost.

”

“We are all wishing we hadn’t; because memory produces imagination, and imagination is a state by itself.

Memory was the Muses’ mother, and the muses are nine names of the imagination.

I told you you’d see some fun. Now I must go over to the coastguards and order a car. We want to take you somewhere tomorrow. See the thunder clouds banking up? I must get back before the rain.”

All fairly true, but Picus had done something. Just a little devilry. Her heart caught at a beat, she tasted something in her mouth, salt like pain.

Pain so soon after. Other side of the halfpenny.

She sneered and sat down, tapping the bright boards with her stick.

“The kitchen fire, mark you,” said Felix, suddenly interested again.

Hestia is an old goddess

—I think she had a name written under her altar not even the Romans might know. And in her case, their lives, the sap of their bodies was nourished at Nanna’s fire.

Boys fresh as roses in a shopwindow, as picked and perfect. Only a close observer might have said that Felix was still on his bush. Or having left it, that his stalk was not down in the water.

How to pretend to be the devil you are afraid to be.

How to be a grand seigneur on nothing a year.

How to pretend to be the devil you are afraid to be.

How to be a grand seigneur on nothing a year.

How to be yourself when you do not know that self, and are afraid to find out.

How to be a grand seigneur on nothing a year.

How to be yourself when you do not know that self, and are afraid to find out.

How to get tight when you don’t do it regularly.

where, in spite of every grit-weathered leaf, there is a pretence made that all is for the best inside the vast, roaring, fortuitous wilderness: that Epping Forest is the true green wood, and Southend virgin sea.

If Paris is a lovely salon displayed for conversation, London is a lumber-room to be foraged for junk, rubbish, white elephants, treasure.

Midsummer is not the time to do it.

Would do it badly unless she broke him. Could not break him, he would twist and slip off.

A cathedral had better not turn mousetrap, or a chalice a cocktail shaker.

A ten-inch gun should not be trained on a mark that is not there.

A cathedral had better not turn mousetrap, or a chalice a cocktail shaker.

A ten-inch gun should not be trained on a mark that is not there.

And Scylla found that all she could do was laugh to see her friend so much in love.

“Why are you so spiteful about me, Tracy? How do you think you’ll get the best out of a man if you fool him, and show you despise him and give your sweetheart away before him?”

“Everyone goes to bed with me,” said Picus⁠—“always.”

“Now that’s a new thing to sulk about,” said the vicar. “I am very useless. I cannot tell you about the cup. I cannot judge which of you does or should or could love Picus best. Or Clarence. Or you.

More than an approach to wonder.

Wonder was the answer, and familiar objects out of their categories.

He also saw Picus without prejudice, and loved him.

“You’re going down the well, where the cup came—”

“Best place for you, my fancy-girl. If there’s enough water, you’ll drown. If there isn’t, and I don’t think there is, you’ll break every bone in your body.”

She could run like a lapwing, but he could run fast. She was strong as a tree-cat, but he could tear her in two.

“Best place for you, my fancy-girl. If there’s enough water, you’ll drown. If there isn’t, and I don’t think there is, you’ll break every bone in your body.”

She could run like a lapwing, but he could run fast. She was strong as a tree-cat, but he could tear her in two.

“I came to bring you to Picus. He does not want you to be alone on Tollerdown. He is at Tambourne. Lydia sent you a silly letter because” (get his vanity if you can) “she is so in love with you that she’s mad.”

It ripped the skin on her shoulder and entered the clay. She saw another fly towards her and notch her forearm. Another, and there was a tearing pain below her left breast.

Three instants of pain, set in one of fear. Like a great jewel.

Clarence stood by the kitchen door, sharpening an indifferent arrow. She made a supreme effort: not to scream much: not to betray herself. Then a moment of absolute contempt of Clarence. Then of pain.

Like a man who has been given a heavy treasure that he has not looked at and must carry home, he walked on.

Bear your burden in the heat of the day, he sang, who had been in great request at parties for his bawdy repertory.

His track ran through five barrows. By one was a crook-backed angry thorn. A bad patch. He passed it, glad to have left them behind, keeping his face towards the sea. Interlude this day alone, in a train. On a hill.

“I’ll make tea. You lie down a bit.” He was thinking how to lock him in, when the young man dropped, moaning that his head hurt, and that something was trying to get out through his eyes.

Carston hoped it might be the tears he’d cry when he knew what he’d done.

He had always liked Clarence, disliked that his affection should have turned to horror. He even put a cushion under his head. Then snatched up a knife in the kitchen, rushed out and cut Scylla free, and carried her on to the sitting-room couch.

Should I have come myself? Whisht man, let’s look.” Passing, he put the gun at safe, and Carston saw him lay Scylla’s body across his knees, open the chemise he had slit up and retied with a scarf.

“Scylla, you silly bitch, wake up. Man, I know all about wounds. Side glanced off a rib, the rest’s nothing.”

“All but our cruelty to her. I’ve not been that.”