Deadlock quotes

But in the instant’s pause at each eagerly opened drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. It was useless. There was no escape up here.

Pelted from within and without, she paused in laughter with clasped restraining hands⁠ ⁠… the rest of the evening must be spent with people⁠ ⁠… the nearest; the Baileys; she would go down into the dining-room and be charming with the Baileys until tomorrow’s busy thoughtless hours were in sight.

Halfway downstairs she remembered that the forms waiting below, for so long unnoticed and unpondered, might be surprised, perhaps affronted by her sudden interested reappearance. She rushed on. She could break through that barrier. Mrs.

There was a truth in it, but not anything of the whole truth. It was like a photograph … it made you see the slatternly servant and the house and the dreadful looking people going in and out.

Clever phrases that make you see things by a deliberate arrangement, leave an impression that is false to life.

But men do see life in this way, disposing of things and rushing on with their talk; they think like that, all their thoughts false to life; everything neatly described in single phrases that are not true.

He had always objected only to the inaccuracy, not to the dreary-weary sentiment. Sic transit. Almost everyone, even people who liked looking at the night-sky seemed to feel that, in the end. How do they get this kind of impression?

If the stars are sublime, why should the earth be therefore petty? It is part of a sublime system.

If the earth is to be called petty, then the stars must be called petty too. They may not even be inhabited. Perhaps they mean the movement of the vast system going on forever, while men die. The indestructibility of matter.

The indestructibility of matter. But if matter is indestructible, it is not what the people who use the phrase mean by matter. If matter is not conscious, man is more than matter.

If a small, no matter how small, conscious thing is called petty in comparison with big no matter how big unconscious things, everything is made a question of size, which is absurd.

But all these people think that consciousness dies. …

But that is just the dreadful thing. … Cléo de Mérode going back sometimes, with just one woman friend, to the little cabarets. … Intense sympathy with that means that one is a sort of adventuress … the Queen can never ride on an omnibus.

Why does being free give a feeling of meanness?

Being able to begin all over again, always unknown, at any moment; feeling a sort of pity and contempt for the people who can’t; and then being happy and forgetting them. But there is pain all round it that they never know.

Being able to begin all over again, always unknown, at any moment; feeling a sort of pity and contempt for the people who can’t; and then being happy and forgetting them. But there is pain all round it that they never know.

It is only by the pain of remaining free that one can have the whole world round one all the time.

… But it disappears. …

But when they came round to meet hers, his head still reined up and motionless, she seemed to face the chubby upright determination of a baby, and the deep melancholy in the eyes was like the melancholy of a puppy.

“Pairhaps,” he said, “one of your doctors shall sairtify me for a fit and proper person.”

Miriam stared her double stupefaction. For a moment, as if to give her time to consider his suggestion, his smile remained, still deferential but with the determined boldness of a naughty child lurking behind it;

“It is all quite easy; it only appears to be difficult.”

“It shall be easy; you have, I remark, a more clear pure English than I have met; and I am very intelligent. It shall not be difficult.”

Miriam hid her laughter by gathering up one of his books with a random question. But how brave. Why should not people admit intelligence? … It was a sort of pamphlet, in French.

“It shall be easy; you have, I remark, a more clear pure English than I have met; and I am very intelligent. It shall not be difficult.”

Miriam hid her laughter by gathering up one of his books with a random question. But how brave. Why should not people admit intelligence?

… It was a sort of pamphlet, in French.

What was Mr. Leyton doing with such a book? Where had it come from? She read swiftly, grasping the argument. The usual sort of thing; worse, because it was colloquial, rushing along in modern everyday language and in some curious way not badly written. …

Because some women had corns, feminine beauty was a myth; because the world could do without Mrs. Hemans’ poetry, women should confine their attention to puddings and babies.

The infernal complacent cheek of it. This was the kind of thing middle-class men read. Unable to criticise it, they thought it witty and unanswerable. That was the worst of it. Books of this sort were read without anyone there to point things out.

The infernal complacent cheek of it. This was the kind of thing middle-class men read. Unable to criticise it, they thought it witty and unanswerable. That was the worst of it. Books of this sort were read without anyone there to point things out. …

It ought to be illegal to publish a book by a man without first giving it to a woman to annotate.

But what was the answer to men who called women inferior because they had not invented or achieved in science or art? On whose authority had men decided that science and art were greater than anything else?

The world could not go on until this question had been answered. Until then, until it had been clearly explained that men were always and always partly wrong in all their ideas, life would be full of poison and secret bitterness. …

Men fight about their philosophies and religions, there is no certainty in them; but their contempt for women is flawless and unanimous.

Even Emerson … positive and negative, north and south, male and female … why negative? Maeterlinck gets nearest in knowing that women can live, hardly at all, with men, and wait, have always been waiting, for men to come to life.

The fascination of the book still flickered brightly; but far away, retreated into the lonely incommunicable distance of her mind.

It seemed always to be useless and dangerous to talk about books. They were always about something else.

… If she had not asked she would have read the book without finding out it was a masterly study of Anna. Why must a book be a masterly study of some single thing? Everybody wisely raving about it.

He forced her to think. She reflected that solitude was too easy. It was necessary for certainties.

Nothing could be known except in solitude. But the struggle to communicate certainties gave them new life; even if the explanation were only a small piece of the truth.

… “Excuse me I leave you a moment,” he said, turning off through the maze of little figures near the door. The extraordinary new thing was that she could think, untroubled, in his company. She gratefully blessed his disappearing form.

snapping his head off whenever he spoke. … She pulled up sharply. If she thought of him, the fact that she was only passing the time would become visible … what was that just now, opening; about silence?

There is no need to go out into the world. Everything is there without anything; the world is added.

And always whatever happens there is everything to return to. The pattern round her plate was life, alive, everything … what was that idea I used to have? Enough for one person in the world would be enough for everybody … how did it go?

“I shall again have my watch when my father shall send me the next portion of my allowance.” He was not counting on the return of the money! Next month, with his allowance, he would have the watch and forget the incident. …

Wealth made life safe for him. People could be people to him; even strangers; not threats or problems.

But even a wealthy Englishman would not calmly give ten pounds to a disreputable stranger … he would suspect him even if he were not disreputable. It might be true that the Pole was in honest difficulties.

There comes some spiritual crisis and—phwtt—. … It is characteristic of the educated Slav mind to lose itself in face of abstractive insolubilities. But for need of twenty-five shillings. I find in this something peculiarly horrible. In midst of your English civilisation it is pure-barbaric.”

“There has not been any civilisation in the world yet. We are still all living in caves.”

The quotation sounded less convincing than at Wimpole Street. …

His quickening interest drove her on. She turned her eyes from the gas and stared at the carpet, her picture broken up and vanishing before the pathos of its threadbare faded patterns.

“I’m neither a lodger nor a boarder,” she recited hurriedly.

“I have all the advantages of a boarder; the use of the whole house. I’ve had this room and the piano to myself for years, on Sunday mornings until dinner time, and when there are interesting people I can go down to dinner.

“This was indeed a most remarkable psychological experience. It happens rarely to be so near death with full consciousness. But this absence of fear must be in you a personal idiosyncracy.”

“But I was afraid. The thing is that you don’t go on feeling afraid. Do you see?”

“I hear what you say. But while there is the chance of life the instinct of self-preservation is so strong” …

Was it she who was being judged and not Eve? No, or only by herself. Harriett shared her new impressions of Eve, saw how eagerly in her clutch on her new interests she had renounced her old background of inexhaustible sympathy. Gerald did not.

But men have no sense of atmosphere. They only see the appearances of things, understanding nothing of their relationships.

Bewilderment, pessimistic philosophies, regretful poetry. …

“It’s all right. We shan’t mind. We won’t look till she’s got it on.”

“If you look then, you will be dazzled by my radiance.”

Miriam stood listening in astonishment to the echoes of the phrase, fashioned from nothing upon her lips by something within her, unknown, wildly to be welcomed if its power of using words that left her not merely untouched and unspent, but taut and invigorated, should …

She struggled with her stiffly opening umbrella, listening joyfully to the sound of the London rain.

She asked nothing of life but to stay where she was, to go on.

… London was her pillar of cloud and fire, undeserved, but unsolicited, life’s free gift. In still exultation she heard her footsteps go down into the street and along the streaming pavement.

She struggled with her stiffly opening umbrella, listening joyfully to the sound of the London rain. She asked nothing of life but to stay where she was, to go on. …

London was her pillar of cloud and fire, undeserved, but unsolicited, life’s free gift.

In still exultation she heard her footsteps go down into the street and along the streaming pavement. The light from a lamp just ahead fell upon a figure, plunging in a swift diagonal across the muddy roadway towards her.

“That is a prejudice. Your English law is the very basis of your English freedom.”

“They are awful. The others look Christians. They don’t.”

Fancy defending Christianity. …

Scraps of conversation reached her from all over the room; eloquent words, fashioned easily, without thought, a perfect flowing of understanding, to and fro, without obstruction. No heaven could be more marvellous.

People talked incessantly because in silence they were ghosts.

A single word sounded the secret of the universe … there is a dead level of intelligence throughout humanity.

She listened in wonder whilst she explained aloud that she had learned most of her French by reading again and again for the sake of the long even rhythm of its sentences, one book; that this was the only honest way to acquire a language.

It was like a sea, each sentence a wave rolling in, rising till the light shone through its glistening crest, dropping, to give way to the next oncoming wave

, the meaning gathering, accumulating, coming nearer with each rising falling rhythm; each chapter a renewed tide, monotonously repeating throughout the book in every tone of light and shade the same burden, the secret of everything in the world.

It sounded out, at conversational pitch, with a colourless serenity that instantly explained his bearing, revealing him beyond the region either of diffidence or temerity. It was a voice speaking to no one, in a world emptied of everything that had gone before.

“The progress of philosophy,” went the words, in letters of gold across the dark void “is by a series of systems; that of science by the constant addition of small facts to accumulated knowledge.”

In the slight pause Miriam held back from the thoughts flying out in all directions round the glowing words, they would come again, if she could memorise the words from which they were born, coolly, registering the shape and length of the phrases and the …

“A system,” pursued the voice “very generally corrects the fallacy of the preceding system, and leans perhaps in the opposite direction.” She flushed warm beneath the pressure of her longing to remain cool …

“Thus the movements of philosophic thought may be compared to the efforts of a drunken man to reach his home.”

The blue eyes remained unaltered, while the large fresh face expanded with a smiling radiance. He was a darling. “He reels against the wall to his right and gains an impetus which sends him staggering to the left and so on;

Dr. McHibbert’s voice interrupted her, damming up the urgent flow of communications. She watched him, listening without attention.

“He’s like a marvellously intelligent bolster,” she said tonelessly “but with a heart and a soul. He certainly has a soul.”

Flattered by a soft chuckle of amusement, she added in a low murmuring man’s voice “the objectors are like candle-lit turnip ghosts,” and was rewarded by the first direct glance from the blue eyes, smiling, assuring her that she was acceptable.

No one seemed at all disturbed; the lecturer least of all. Perhaps he felt that the effects of real realisation would be so tremendous that he could not face them.

The thought of no God made life simply silly. The thought of God made it embarrassing.

If a hand suddenly appeared writing on the wall, what would he do? He would blush; standing there as a competitor, fighting for his theories, amongst the theories of other men.

Everybody was so calm.

The calmness of insanity. Nobody quite all there.

Yet intelligent. What were they all thinking about, wreathed in films of intelligent insanity; watching the performance in the intervals of lives filled with words that meant nothing … breath was more than words;

It would be such an awful labour … in the long interval the strength for it would disappear. Thoughts must be kept away. Activities. The weekend would be a vacuum of tense determination. That was the payment for headlong speech.

Speech, thought-out speech, does nothing but destroy.

There had been a moment of hesitation in the train, swamped by the illumination coming from the essay. …

That is why there are everywhere torrents of speech. If she had not read all those old words in the train and had been silent. Silence is reality.

Life ought to be lived on a basis of silence, where truth blossoms.

Why isn’t such an urgent thing known? Life would become like the individual; alive … it would show, inside and out, and people would leave off talking so much. Life does show, seen from far off, pouring down into stillness.

It had been love then, all along.

Love was the secret of things.

They wandered silently, apart, along the golden-gleaming street.

Holding to it, everything in life, even difficulties, would be transparent. But seen from the outside, by the world, an awful mysteriously persistent commonplace. It was not fair that men did not know the whole of this secret place and its compact.

Why was God in league only with women?

But a private reconstruction of standards in agreement with one person would not bring healing. It was history, literature, the way of stating records, reports, stories, the whole method of statement of things from the beginning that was on a false foundation.

If only one could speak as quickly as one’s thoughts flashed, and several thoughts together, all with a separate life of their own and yet belonging, everybody would be understood.

As it was, even in the most favourable circumstances, people could hardly communicate with each other at all.

There isn’t any ‘chaos.’ Never has been. It’s the principal masculine illusion. It is not a truth to say that women must be civilised.

Feminists are not only an insult to womanhood. They are a libel on the universe.

” In the awful presence she had spoken herself out, found and recited her best most liberating words. The little unseen room shone, its shining speaking up to her from small things immediately under her eyes.