Interim quotes

Why would people insist upon talking about things—when nothing can ever be communicated. … She felt angrily about in the expectant stillness. She could see their minds so clearly; why wouldn’t they just look and see hers instead of waiting for some impossible pronouncement.

Yes would be a lie. No would be a lie. Any statement would be a lie. All statements are lies.

I like the Pernes better than I like you. I like all of you better than the Pernes. I hate you. I hate the Pernes. I, of course you must know it, hate everybody.

There must always be a clear cold room to return to. There was no other way of keeping the inward peace. Outside one need do nothing but what was expected of one, asking nothing for oneself but freedom to return, to the centre.

Life would be an endless inward singing until the end came.

But not too much inward singing, spending one’s strength in song; the song must be kept down and low so that it would last all the time and never fail. Then a song would answer back from outside, in everything.

There was no thought in the silence, no past or future, nothing but the strange thing for which there were no words, something that was always there as if by appointment, waiting for one to get through to it away from everything in life.

It was the thing that was nothing.

Yet it seemed the only thing that came near and meant anything at all. It was happiness and realisation. It was being suspended, in nothing. It came out of oneself because it came only when one had been a long time alone.

scraps of other people’s things. No one in the world could imagine what it is to me to have this house; the fag-end of the Baileys’ stock-in-trade. God couldn’t know, completely. There’s something wrong about it; but damn, I can’t help it.

In my secret self I should love a prison. Walls. What are walls?

If she scuffed her muddy shoes too cheerfully someone would appear at the dining-room door. Beyond the gaslight pouring down on to the smeary marble of the hall table and glimmering against the threatening dining-room door the dim staircase beckoned her up into darkness.

removing the need for seeking them out purposely from time to time. Cut and dried. I’ve patriotic ballads cut and dried. I’m cut and dried, everybody thinks. Moving and speaking stiffly, the stamp of my family, the minute anything is expected of me.

Nobody knows me. I grow more and more unknown and more and more like what people think of me.

… But I know; and things go on coming; scraps of other people’s things. No one in the world could imagine what it is to me to have this house; the fag-end of the Baileys’ stock-in-trade. God couldn’t know, completely. There’s something wrong about it;

Everyone ought to know. It ought to be on the omnibuses and in the menu. All these people fussing about not knowing of Ibsen’s Brand. A volume, bound in a cover. Alive. Precious.

What is Genius? Something that can take you into Norway in an A.B.C.

She wandered out into Oxford Street. There was a vast fresh gold-lit sky somewhere behind the twilight. Why did Ibsen sit down in Norway and write plays? Why did people say Ibsen as if it were the answer to something?

She wandered out into Oxford Street. There was a vast fresh gold-lit sky somewhere behind the twilight. Why did Ibsen sit down in Norway and write plays? Why did people say Ibsen as if it were the answer to something?

Walking along Oxford Street with a read volume of Ibsen held against you is walking along with something precious between two covers which makes you know you are rich and free.

… She wandered on and on in an expansion of everything that passed into her mind out and out towards a centre in Norway. She wondered whether Ibsen were still alive. A vast beautiful Norway and a man writing his thoughts in a made-up play.

but there was not in the whole world the thing he thought he saw. Perhaps if he remained steadily like that in her life she could grow into some semblance of his steady reverent observation. He did not miss any movement or change of expression.

Perhaps you need to be treated as an object of romantic veneration before you can become one.

Perhaps in Canada there were old-fashioned women who were objects of romantic veneration all their lives, living all the time as if they were Maud or some other woman from Tennyson.

She set out from the house of friends to meet the darkened daylight … perhaps the sudden tapping of thunder-drops upon her thin blouse. The street was a livid grey, brilliant with hidden sunlight.

The present can be judged by the part of the past it brings up. If the present brings up the happiness of the past, the present is happy.

Purgatory. The waters of Lethe and Eunoe “forgetfulness and sweet memory”; and then Heaven. The Catholics are right about expiation. If you are happy in the present something is being expiated.

Bathing in the waters of Lethe and Eunoe unworthily is drinking one’s own damnation. But happiness crops up before one can prevent it.

Perhaps happiness is one long sin, piling up a bill.⁠ ⁠… It is my secret companion.

Waiting at the end of every dark passage. I did not make myself. I can’t help it.

All the forms seated round the table were beautiful; faraway and secret and separate, each oneself set in the coming of summer, unconscious. One soul.

Summer is the soul of man.

Through all the past months they had been the waiting guests of summer.

It was deliberate. Put in deliberately to frighten you into reading more. Dangerous. The adjective in the sentence, personal, a matter of opinion. People who read the books do not think about adjectives. They like them.

Conversation is adjectives!

… all the worry of conversation is because people use adjectives and rush on.

“I don’t care how it begins. It’s perfect.

It makes the whole day an adventure even if you’re indoors.

It’s perfect to have the light on and nothing to be seen outside but a copper glare. Outside is a glorious adventure in a new unknown world. … In a way all our weathers are that.

“

I’d rather see a woman suffer than a man and a man rather than a child and a child rather than an animal.

Animals are bewildered and don’t understand. They have nothing to help them. They don’t understand their sufferings.”

“

Women appear to be callous over the sufferings of other women and to make a fuss over men. It’s because sick men are more helpless and pitiful. Women appear to be. But the sun appears to go round the earth.

”

“The divine curiosity of Eve … that’s the answer to the Mosaic fable about woman. She was interested in the serpent, and polite to him and gossiped with him.

Science is scandal-mongering; gossip about the universe. Men talk about women gossiping. My word.

”

“It is.

Darwin gossiped about monkeys and in his old age he looked exactly like one and regretted that he had neglected music.

”

“

I prefer⁠ ⁠… the equator, and the moon, and the plane of the ecliptic; I think the plane of the ecliptic is a perfectly lovely thing.

”

“

A menagerie lion running round the world once in every twenty-four hours. I think it’s an absolutely perfect idea.

”

out of the house, back to Canada. Dr. von Heber gone without a word. Perhaps he had been worried. They all had. That was why they had all been so nice and surrounding. … That was the explanation of everything. …

They were brothers. Jealous brothers. The first she had had.

This was the sort of thing girls had who had brothers. Cheek. If only she had known and shown them how silly they were.

But the Irish were not people … they did not care for anything. Meredith was partly Celtic. That was why his writing always felt to be pointing in some invisible direction. He wrote so much because he did not care about anything.

Novelists were angry men lost in a fog.

But how did they find out how to do it? Brain. Frontal development. But it was not certain that that was not just the extra piece wanted to control the bigger muscular system. Sacrificed to muscle.