Crome Yellow quotes

Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be getting nearer to what he wanted. Dinted, dimpled, wimpled—his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point.

He was enamoured with the beauty of words.

Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on the crest of a descent. The road plunged down, steep and straight, into a considerable valley. There, on the opposite slope, a little higher up the valley, stood Crome, his destination.

“Yes, isn’t it lovely?” Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods. “But we had such awful thunderstorms last week.”

Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity.

He might talk forever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most.

Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He might talk forever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone?

We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most.

“They are very alarming, these thunderstorms,” he said, helping himself to porridge. “Don’t you think so? Or are you above being frightened?”

Denis was dreadfully taken aback. There was no possible retort.

“You speak as though I were a child in a new frock,” he said, with a show of irritation.

“But that’s how I feel about you, Denis dear.”

“It sounds lovely,” said Anne.

“The distant future always does.”

Mary’s china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever, were fixed on Mr. Scogan. “Bottles?” she said. “Do you really think so? Bottles …”

It was probably nothing, she reflected. Anne often smiled for no apparent reason; it was probably just a habit. “I hope I shan’t dream of falling down wells again tonight,” she added.

“Ladders are worse,” said Anne.

Mary nodded. “Yes, ladders are much graver.”

And she came and put him through this absurd catechism! She was like “Mangold’s Questions”: “What are the three diseases of wheat?”—“Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?”

“Blight, Mildew, and Smut,” he replied, with the laconism of one who is absolutely certain of his own mind.

It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night. Vague but agonising miseries possessed his mind. It was not only Anne who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life in general, the universe.

Gombauld dropped his cigarette end and trod on it.

“Tschuplitski’s finished painting,” he said. “I’ve finished my cigarette. But I’m going on painting.”

And, advancing towards her, he put his arm round her shoulders and turned her round, away from the picture.

“Phooh!” he said, and shut the door again. “It smells of dust and mildew. How symbolical! One comes to the great masterpieces of the past, expecting some miraculous illumination, and one finds, on opening them, only darkness and dust and a faint smell of decay.

After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

Still—the Tales of Knockespotch …”

But after a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn’t. And yet I think I have a more vivid imagination than most.

One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.

”

There was just a hint in that triumphant harmony that the seventh had been struck along with the octave by the thumb of the left hand; but the general effect of splendid noise emerged clearly enough.

Small details matter little so long as the general effect is good.

And, besides, that hint of the seventh was decidedly modern. He turned round in his seat and tossed the hair back out of his eyes.

He rubbed his cheek, caressed and caressing, against the thick, sleek mass of her hair. In a little while he began to sing again; the night trembled amorously to the sound of his voice. When he had finished he kissed her.

Anne or Mary: Mary or Anne. It didn’t seem to make much difference which it was.

There were differences in detail, of course; but the general effect was the same; and, after all, the general effect was the important thing.

He liked to think so. And now it was no more. These weary young men, if they wanted to dance, would have to bicycle six miles to the town. The country was desolate, without life of its own, without indigenous pleasures.

The pious magistrates had snuffed out forever a little happy flame that had burned from the beginning of time.

“And as on Tullia’s tomb one lamp burned clear, Unchanged for fifteen hundred year …”

“My poor grandfather!” Mr. Wimbush added, as he closed his book and put away his pince-nez. “Whenever I read in the papers about oppressed nationalities, I think of him.” He relighted his cigar. “

It was a maternal government, highly centralised, and there were no representative institutions.

”

But since I put it as I do, ‘Black ladders lack bladders,’ it becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing⁠—what is that but magic?

And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world’s greatest poetry is simply ‘Les échelles noires manquent de vessie,’ translated into magic significance as, ‘Black ladders lack bladders.’ And you can’t appreciate words. I’m sorry for you.”

And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world’s greatest poetry is simply ‘Les échelles noires manquent de vessie,’ translated into magic significance as, ‘Black ladders lack bladders.’ And you can’t appreciate words. I’m sorry for you.”

“A mental carminative,” said Mr. Scogan reflectively. “That’s what you need.”

it’s so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages.

You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy.

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as the strawberries and cream.”

In the hall he saw Mr. Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in wait. Denis tried to escape, but in vain.

Mr. Scogan’s eye glittered like the eye of the Ancient Mariner.

“Not so fast,” he said, stretching out a small saurian hand with pointed nails—“not so fast. I was just going down to the flower garden to take the sun. We’ll go together.”

Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. “After all,” he said to himself—“after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he’s already somebody and I’m still only potential …”

“Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,”

Mr. Scogan went on. Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless insistence of Mr. Scogan’s discourse gradually compelled his attention. “Men such as I am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We’re too sane; we’re merely reasonable.

For the lower species the earth will be restored to the centre of the universe and man to preeminence on the earth. Oh, I envy the lot of the commonality in the Rational State!

Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters, convinced of their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men has ever been.

They will go through life in a rosy state of intoxication, from which they will never awake.

you’re too independent and unsuggestible to belong to the larger Herd; you have none of the characteristics required in a Man of Faith. As for the Directing Intelligences, they will have to be marvellously clear and merciless and penetrating.” He paused and shook his head.

“No, I can see no place for you; only the lethal chamber.”

Deeply hurt, Denis emitted the imitation of a loud Homeric laugh. “I’m getting sunstroke here,” he said, and got up.

But travel by Tube and you see nothing but the works of man—iron riveted into geometrical forms, straight lines of concrete, patterned expanses of tiles. All is human and the product of friendly and comprehensible minds.

All philosophies and all religions⁠—what are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the universe!

Through these narrow tunnels, where all is recognisably human, one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round and below and above them stretches the blind mass of earth, endless and unexplored. Yes, give me the Tube and Cubismus every time;

In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilege reserved to him alone.

For the rest of the world he was surely an image of flawless crystal.

It was almost axiomatic.

It seemed, somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as elaborate and complete as he in his.

Impossible; and yet, periodically he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence.

The red notebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It put beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.

“And little Luce with the white legs, And bouncing Barbary …”

Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?

He walked slowly round the water’s edge. In an embayed recess among the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.

“Yes,” Mr. Scogan thoughtfully agreed.

“Yes, the war was certainly something of a holiday. It was a step beyond Southend; it was Weston-super-Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe.”

The steam-organ sent up prodigious music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies were like a musical shattering of glass and brass.

Far down in the bass the Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous seesaw.

Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended, bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest.

After a long and silent inspection, Mr. Scogan would suddenly look up and ask, in a hoarse whisper, some horrifying question, such as,

“Have you ever been hit on the head with a hammer by a young man with red hair?”

When the answer was in the negative, which it could hardly fail to be, Mr. Scogan would nod several times, saying, “I was afraid so. Everything is still to come, still to come, though it can’t be very far off now.”

In 1918 she did rather better, for between January 1st and the date of the Armistice she ate 3,300 peaches. Since the Armistice she had relaxed her efforts; now she did not eat more than two or three peaches a day.

Her constitution, she complained, had suffered; but it had suffered for a good cause.

Denis answered her greeting by a vague and polite noise.

Francis, of Dr. Johnson; a few weeks have made me thoroughly acquainted with these interesting characters, and I have been spared the tedious and revolting process of getting to know them by personal contact, which I should have to do if they were living now.

How gay and delightful life would be if one could get rid of all the human contacts!

Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection—for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery—then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in …

… in Toledo seemed to me, while I was actually performing this rather dangerous feat, an action as obvious, as much to be taken for granted, as—how shall I put it?—as quotidian as catching the 8:52 from Surbiton to go to business on a Monday morning.

Adventures and romance only take on their adventurous and romantic qualities at secondhand.

Live them, and they are just a slice of life like the rest. In literature they become as charming as this dismal ball would be if we were celebrating its tercentenary.”

Mr. Scogan ran to the foot of the stairs and called up after him.

“It makes no difference, none whatever. Life is gay all the same, always, under whatever circumstances⁠—under whatever circumstances,”

he added, raising his voice to a shout. But Denis was already far out of hearing, and even if he had not been, his mind tonight was proof against all the consolations of philosophy. Mr.