Revolving Lights quotes

Yet this wonder was more to them than all the things on which their thoughts were fixed. If they would take time to realise it.

No one takes time. No one knows it.⁠ ⁠… But I know it.⁠ ⁠…

These seconds of knowing, of being told, afresh, by things speaking silently, make up for the pain of failing to find out what I ought to be doing. …

Just ahead, at the end of the walk home, the small isolated Tansley Street world, full of secretive people drifting about on the edge of catastrophe, that would leave, when it engulfed them, no ripple on the surface of the tide of London life.

In the space between these surrounding worlds was the everlasting solitude; ringing as she moved to cross the landing, with voices demanding an explanation of her presence in any one of them.

“Now that,” she quoted, to counter the foremost attack, “is a man who can be trusted to say what he thinks.”

But even if factories were abolished and the unpleasant kinds of work shared out so that they pressed upon nobody, how could the Kingdom of Heaven come upon earth as long as there were childbirth and cancer?

Light makes shadows. The devil is God’s shadow?

The Persians believed that in the end the light would absorb the darkness. That was credible. But it could never happen on earth.

Huge families. Hunting. Great Christmas and Harvest parties. Maypoles in the spring. They always saw the spring, every year without fail. Perhaps that was their secret? Wherever they were they saw nothing but dawn and spring, the light coming from the darkness.

They shouted against the darkness because they knew the light was hidden in it.

If you’re waking, call me early, call me early …

“You’ve got a tenacity. I’d back you against anyone in argument, when you’re roused.”

“Argument is no good to anybody, world without end, amen.”

“Don’t be frivolous, Miriam. Real argument’s a fine clean weapon.”

The art of making atmospheres. It’s as big an art as any other. Most women can exercise it, for reasons, by fits and starts. The best women work at it the whole of the time. Not one man in a million is aware of it.

It’s like air within the air.

It may be deadly. Cramping and awful, or simply destructive, so that no life is possible within it. So is the bad art of men. At its best it is absolutely life-giving. And not soft. Very hard and stern and austere in its beauty.

“I can. Through their preeminence in an art.

The art of making atmospheres. It’s as big an art as any other.

Most women can exercise it, for reasons, by fits and starts. The best women work at it the whole of the time. Not one man in a million is aware of it. It’s like air within the air. It may be deadly.

“Well; I’m so staggered by it. All women, of course, know about it, and there’s the explanation of why women clash. Over what men call ‘trifles.’ Because the thing I mean goes through everything.

A woman’s way of ‘being’ can be discovered in the way she pours out tea.

Men can’t get on together. If they’re boxed up. Do you know there’s hardly a partnership in Wimpole Street that’s not a permanent feud. Yes. Would you believe it.

… They leave life so small that it seems worthless. He leaves everything big; and all he tells added to experience forever. It’s dreadful to think of people missing him; the forgetfulness and the new birth into life.

Even God would enjoy reading Typhoon.⁠ ⁠…

Then that is “great fiction?” “Creation?” Why these falsifying words, making writers look cutoff and mysterious? Imagination. What is imagination? It always seems insulting, belittling, both to the writer and to life.

A sudden smooth complacent male voice, making your attention rock between the live text and the picture of a supercilious lounging form, slippers, a pipe, other men sitting round, and then the phrase so smooth and good that it almost compels belief.

Why cannot men exist without thinking themselves all there is?

She was in the open roadway, passing into the deeps of the central freedom of Piccadilly Circus, the crowded corner unknowingly left behind.

She summoned Harriett and shrieked with laughter at the cheerful din. It was cheerful, even in a funeral march.

There would certainly be music in heaven; but not books.

The shock of meeting Tommy had brought the grey of tomorrow morning into the gold-lit streets. There was a fresh breeze setting down Shaftesbury Avenue. Here, still on the Circus, was that little coffee-place. Tommy was going home.

A barrister, a waiter, recognisable. Men have no natural rank. A woman can become a waitress and remain herself. Yet men pity women, and think them hard because they do not pity each other.

It is man, puzzled, astray, always playing with breakable toys, lonely and terrified in his universe of chaotic forces who is pitiful.

The chaos that torments him is his own rootless self. The key, unsuspected, at his side.

Illiterate, hampered, feeling her way all the time. And yet with a perfect knowledge. Perfect comprehension in her smile. All the maddening moments spent with her, the endless detail and fussing, all afterwards showing upon a background of gold.

Men weave golden things; thought, science, art, religion upon a black background.

They never are. They only make or do; unconscious of the quality of life as it passes. So are many women. But there is a moment in meeting a woman, any woman, the first moment, before speech, when everything becomes new;

but only if one simply outlined the facts, leaving out all the inside things. Knowing a story like that from the inside, knowing Eleanor, changed all “scandalous” stories. … They were scandalous only when told? Never when thought of by individuals alone?

Speech is technical. Every word.

In telling things, technical terms must be used; which never quite apply. … To call Eleanor an adventuress does not describe her. You can only describe her by the original contents of her mind. Her own images; what she sees and thinks.

And now married, in a cathedral, to a vicar; looking angelic in the newspaper photograph. He has only one regret … their childlessness. “Er? Have children?” Yet Mrs. Drake would be staunch and kind to her if she were in need.

Women are Jesuits.⁠ ⁠…

From the first, in Eleanor’s mind, had shone, unquestioned, the shape of English life. Church and State and Family. God above. Her belief was perfect; impressive. In all her dealings she saw the working of a higher power, leading her to her goal.

His words followed hers like a continuation of her phrase:

“Mademoiselle, I see the People.”

His eyes were on hers, an intense blue light; not concentrated on her; going through her and beyond in a widening radiance. She was caught up through the unresisting eyes; the dreamy voice away behind her. She saw the wide white spaces of Russia;

Because they are not living, but calculating. … Women who are not living ought to spend all their time cracking jokes.

In a rotten society women grow witty; making a heaven while they wait.⁠ ⁠…

But if from this far cool place where she now was, she breathed deep and let mirth flow out, he would never go.

“Pardon me; you are wrong.”

“Thought is a secondary human faculty, and can’t lead, anyone, anywhere.”

He turned away to the Lintoffs with a question. His voice was like a cracked bell. Lintoff’s gentle, indifferent tones made a docile response.

She faced them with arguments, flinching as she recognised this acknowledgment of their power.

Lifelong loneliness is a phrase.

With no evidence for its meaning, but the things set down in books. … People who record loneliness, bare their wounds, and ask for pity, are not wholly wounded. For others, no one has any right to speak. … What is “a lonely figure”?

For others, no one has any right to speak. … What is “a lonely figure”? If it knows it is lonely it is not altogether lonely. If it does not know, it is not lonely.

Books about people are lies from beginning to end.

However sincere, they cannot offer any evidence about life. Even lifelong loneliness is life; too marvellous to express. Absolutely, of course. But relatively? Relative things are forgotten when you are alone. …

… What is “a lonely figure”? If it knows it is lonely it is not altogether lonely. If it does not know, it is not lonely. Books about people are lies from beginning to end. However sincere, they cannot offer any evidence about life.

Even lifelong loneliness is life; too marvellous to express.

Absolutely, of course. But relatively? Relative things are forgotten when you are alone. …

Somewhere at the end of this ramble into the past, was a release from wrath. She rallied to the coolness far away within her tingling blood.

How astoundingly good life was; generous to the smallest effort.⁠ ⁠…

The scenes gathered about her, called her back, acquired backgrounds that spread and spread. She watched single figures going on into lives in which she had no part; into increasing incidents, leaving them, as they had found them, unaware.

This is the real sky, in full power, stripping away sleep. Time, visible, pouring itself out.

Day, not night, is forgetfulness of time.

Its movement is a dream. Only in its noise is real silence and peace. This awful stillness is made of sound; the sound of time, pouring itself out;

What is there to do? How know what is anyone’s best welfare?

To be alive, and to know it, makes a selfless life impossible.

Any kind of life accompanied by that stupendous knowledge, is selfish.

Even the thought of the bright scenes, the scenes that did not matter and were nothing, spread over the sky the sense of the dawn it would be obliged to bring; … the permitted postponement of the problems set by night.

Dawn stole into the heart.

With a sudden answer. That had no words. An answer that lost itself again in the day. But there would be no dawn; only the pitiless beginning of a day spoiled by the fever of a sleepless night. Torment, for nothing.

“Things always end just as they’re beginning.”

“Things end, Miriam, so that other things may begin.”

She roused herself to give battle. But Alma drifted between, crying gaily that there was tomorrow. A good strong tomorrow. Warranted to stand hard wear.

Always a new idea. Always describing and destroying, filtering down, as time goes on to quite simple people, poisoning their lives, because men must have a formula. Men are gossips.

Science is⁠ ⁠… cosmic scandalmongering.

Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for the House of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly scientific. They quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip. Centuries of unopposed masculine gossip about the universe.

Science is Cosmic Scandalmongering. Perhaps that might do for the House of Lords. But those old fogies are not particularly scientific. They quote the Classics. The same thing. Club gossip.

Centuries of unopposed masculine gossip about the universe.

Years ago he said there will be no more him and her, the novels of the future will be clear of all that. … Poetry nothing. Religion nothing. Women a biological contrivance. And now.

How can anyone feel romantic about him? Alma. But that is the real old-fashioned romance of everyday, from her girlhood. Hidden through loyalty to his shifting man’s ideas? Half convinced by them? How can people be romantic impermanently, just now and again?

Romance is solitary and permanent. Always there. In everybody.

That is why the things one hears about people are like stories, not referring to life. Why I always forget them when the people themselves are there. Or believe, when they talk of their experiences, that they misread them.

A pen should be thin, not disturbing the hand, and the nib flexible and silent, with up and down strokes.

Fountain pen writing is like⁠ ⁠… democracy.

”

“

Machine-made things are dead things.

”

“That’s old Ellis’s idea. There’s been a matriarchate all right, Miriam, for your comfort.”

“I don’t want comfort, I want truth.”

“Oh you don’t, Miriam. One gives you facts and you slide away from them.”

The tiger stepping down his blue plaque. The one thing in the room that nothing could influence. All the other single beautiful things change. They are beautiful, for a moment, again and again; giving out their expression, and presently frozen stiff, having no expression.

The blue plaque, intense fathomless eastern blue, the thick spiky grey-green sharply shaped leaves, going up forever, the heavy striped beast forever curving through, his great paw always newly set on the base of the plaque; inexhaustible, never looked at enough; always bringing the same joy.

… If ever the memory of this room fades away, the blue plaque will remain.

Hancock gravely, turning to the scatter of letters on his table. He was glad. And his kind sympathy was not being fooled. Sarah was always being ill. It was worth a lie to drag her out into the light of his sympathy.

A breath of true life, born from a lie.

The incident was at an end, safely through. He was satisfied and believing, gone on into his day. She gathered up his appointment book from under his nose. He was using it, making entries.