The Tunnel quotes

You know in advance when you are really following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backwards to something you know is there.

However far you go out you come back.

… I am back now where I was before I began trying to do things like other people. I left home to get here. None of those things can touch me here. They are mine. …

A light had come in the dormer on the other side of the street. It remained unscreened. Watching carefully she could see only a dim figure moving amongst motionless shapes.

No need to trouble about the blind. London could come freely in day and night through the unscreened happy little panes; light and darkness and darkness and light.

London, just outside all the time, coming in with the light, coming in with the darkness, always present in the depths of the air in the room.

It remained unscreened. Watching carefully she could see only a dim figure moving amongst motionless shapes. No need to trouble about the blind. London could come freely in day and night through the unscreened happy little panes; light and darkness and darkness and light.

London, just outside all the time, coming in with the light, coming in with the darkness, always present in the depths of the air in the room.

The gas flared out into a wide bright flame. The dingy ceiling and counterpane turned white.

She thought of me as a business young lady.

Following advice is certain to be wrong.

When you don’t follow advice there may be awful things. But they are not arranged beforehand. And when they come you do not know that they are awful until you have half got hold of something else.

But they are not arranged beforehand. And when they come you do not know that they are awful until you have half got hold of something else. Then they change into something that has not been awful.

Things that remain awful are in some way not finished.

… Those women are awful. They will get more and more awful, still disliking and disapproving till they die. I shall not see them again.

Pancras bells stopped again. In the stillness she could hear the sound of her own munching. She stared at the surface of the table that held her plate and cup. It was like sitting up to the nursery table.

“How frightfully happy I am,” she thought with bent head.

Happiness streamed along her arms and from her head. St. Pancras bells began playing a hymn tune in single firm beats with intervals between that left each note standing for a moment gently in the air.

Tennyson did not know what he was saying when he wrote it in his calm patronising way. Mr. Tremayne would admire it as a “great truth”—thinking it like a man in the way Tennyson thought it.

What a hopeless thing a man’s consciousness was.

How awful to have nothing but a man’s consciousness. One could test it so easily if one were a little careful, and know exactly how it would behave. …

… Tansley Street was a soft grey gloaming after the darkness. When she rattled her key into the keyhole of number seven she felt that her day was beginning. It would be perpetually beginning now.

Nights and days were all one day; all hers, unlimited.

Her life and work at Wimpole Street were something extra, thrown in with her own life of endless day. Sarah and Harriett, their lives and friends, her own friends, the Brooms, the girls in Kennett Street, all thrown in.

Even the business people who went about intent, going to definite places were in the secret of London and looked free. The expression of the collar and hair of many of them said they had homes. But they got away from them.

No one who had never been alone in London was quite alive.

… I’m free—I’ve got free—nothing can ever alter that she thought, gazing wide-eyed into the fire, between fear and joy. The strange familiar pang gave the place a sort of consecration. A strength was piling up within her.

“Footstools; office stools; you never saw a sheltered woman venture on to the hearthrug except for a second if she’s shortsighted to look at the clock.” Miriam sprang to the hearthrug and waved her cigarette.

“Con‑fu‑sion to the sheltered life!”

The vast open of London swung, welcoming, before her eyes.

“So do I. I think the child’s quite right there.

Freedom is life. We may be slaves all day and guttersnipes all the rest of the time but ach Gott, we are free.

”

… “Make the best of your youth my dear before it flies.” If it all ended in sadness and envy of youth, life was simply a silly trick.

Life could not be a silly trick. Life cannot be a silly trick.

That is the simple truth … a certainty. Whatever happens, whatever things look like, life is not a trick.

If it all ended in sadness and envy of youth, life was simply a silly trick. Life could not be a silly trick. Life cannot be a silly trick. That is the simple truth … a certainty.

Whatever happens, whatever things look like, life is not a trick.

Miriam began singing again when she felt herself in her own street, clear and empty in the moonlight. The north wind blew down it unobstructed and she was shivering and singing … “spring is co‑ming a‑and the swa‑llows—have come back to te‑ell me so.”

That is what that means. To toss all the joys and happiness away and know that you are happy and free without anything. That you cannot escape being happy and free. It always comes.

Why am I so happy and free? she wondered with tears in her eyes.

Why? Why do lovely things and people go on happening? To own that something in you had no right. But not crouching on your knees … standing and singing till everything split with your joy and let you through into the white white brightness.

Other clothes would be got somehow; just by going on and working … there’s so much—eternally. It’s stupendous. I’ve no right to be in it; but I’m in. Someone means me to be in. I can’t help it.

Fancy people being alive. You would think everyone would go mad.

She found herself in bed, sitting up in her flannellette dressing jacket. The stagnant air beneath the sharp downward slope of the ceiling was warmed by the gas. The gaslight glared beautifully over her shoulder down on to the page. …

I can’t bear it. I don’t know what it is. It’s always the same. I always feel the same. It is sending me mad. One day it will be worse. If it gets any worse I shall be mad. Just here. Certainly.

Something is wearing out in me. I am meant to go mad.

If not I should not always be coming along this piece without knowing it, whichever street I take. Other people would know the streets apart. I don’t know where this bit is or how I get to it.

Just the sound. Music. Like Beethoven. Bad acting cannot spoil Shakespeare. Bad playing cannot destroy Beethoven. It was the sound of Shakespeare that made the scenes real—that made Winter’s Tale, so long ago and so bewildering, remain in beauty. … “Dear Eve,

Shakespeare is a sound

…” She tore up the letter. The next time she wrote to Eve she must remember to say that. The garret was stifling. Away from the brilliant window the room was just as hot; the close thick smell of dust sickened her.

How much more real was the relation between Portia and Nerissa than between either of the sadly jesting women and their complacently jesting lovers. Did a man ever speak in a natural voice—neither blustering, nor displaying his cleverness, nor being simply a lustful slave?

Women always despise men under the influence of passion or fatigue.

What horrible old men those two would be—still speaking in put on voices to hide their shame, pompous and philosophising. … “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart …” so much the worse for man;

This was their next stage. When she reached the stairs she felt herself wrapped in their scorn. It was true; there was something impregnable about them.

They sat inside a little fortress, letting in only certain people.

But they did not know she could see everything inside the fortress, hear all their thoughts much more clearly than the things they said. To them she was a closed book. They did not want to open it.

I did not know what I had. …

Friendship is fine fine porcelain. I have sent a crack right through it.

…

nice boys, they could not help chi-iking when they saw the sleeping figures, but they did not mean to disturb. They had wakened her from her first daytime sleep. Asleep! She had slept in broad sunlight at the foot of the little cliff.

Waking in the day time is perfect happiness.

To wake suddenly and fully, nowhere; in paradise; and then to see sharply with large clear strong eyes the things you were looking at when you fell asleep. She lay perfectly still. Perhaps the girls were asleep.

Today, because I am free I am the same person as I was when I was there, but much stronger and happier because I know it. As long as I can sometimes feel like this nothing has mattered.

Life is a chain of happy moments that cannot die.

“Damn those boys—they woke me up.”

“Books posted? I wonder I’m not more rushed. I say—v’you greased all Hancock’s and the Pater’s instruments?”

He knows I’m slacking

… he’ll tell the others when they come back. …

I will never listen to anybody again; or be frightened. That cyclist knew, as long as he was on his bicycle. Perhaps he has people who make him not himself. He can always get away again. Men can always get away.

I am going to lead a man’s life always getting away.

…

What was that I was just thinking? Something I ought to remember. Women have to be protected. But men explain it the wrong way. It was the same thing. … The polite protective man was the same; if he relied on his strength.

The world is the most sickening hash.

… I’m so sorry for you. I hate humanity too. Isn’t it a lovely day? Isn’t it? Just look.

Being really happy or really miserable makes people like you and like being with you.

They need not know the cause. Someone will speak now, in a moment. … Miriam tried to return to the falling rain, the soft light in it, the soft light on the greenery, the intense green glow everywhere … misty green glow.

The dull dust-laden leaves identified themselves with her life. What had become of her autumn of hard work that was to lift her out of her personal affairs and lead somewhere? Already the holiday freshness and vigour had left her; and nothing had been done.

Nothing was so strong as the desire that everything would stop for a moment and allow her to remember

… wearily she mounted the remaining stairs to Mr. Hancock’s room. “I think,” said a clear high confident voice from the chair and stopped. Miriam waited with painful eagerness while the patient rinsed her mouth;

Orly, her unseen face busy with an interrupted errand. He would not hear that her voice was divided. … No one seemed to be aware of the divided voices … no men.

Life went on and on, a great oblivious awfulness, sliding over everything.

Every moment things went that could never be recovered … on and on, and it was always too late, there was always some new thing obliterating everything, something that looked new, but always turned out to be the same as everything else, grinning with its …

The Frenchman at any rate wanted to say something else. But why want to be gallant … and why not say man; it is not very graceful to say it, is the male of woman.

If women had been the recorders of things from the beginning it would all have been the other way round

… Mary. Mary, the Jewess, write something about Mary the Jewess; the Frenchman’s Queen of Heaven.

still snoring when everybody’s fussing and washing.” That would be me … it lit up the hostel. Miss Dear liked that time of fussing and washing in company with all the other cubicles fussing and washing.

To be very poor meant getting more and more social life with no appearances to keep up, getting up each day with a holiday feeling of one more day and the surprise of seeing everybody again; and the certainty that if you died somebody would do something.

Certainly it was this knowledge that gave Miss Dear her peculiar strength. She was a nurse and knew how everything was done. She knew that people, all kinds of people, were people and would do things.

Les yeux gris, vont au paradis. Going along, along, the twilight hides your shabby clothes. They are not shabby. They are clothes you go along in, funny; jolly. Everything’s here, any bit of anything, clear in your brain; you can look at it.

What a terrific thing a person is; bigger than anything. How funny it is to be a person.

You can never not have been a person. Bouleversement. It’s a fait bouleversant. Christ-how-rummy. It’s enough. Du, Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück, ich habe genossen dass irdische Glück; ich habe geleibt und gelebet.

The turning of the key in the latch was lively with the vision of the jumping boy.

The flare of the match in the unlit hall lit up eternity.

The front door was open, eternity poured in and on up the stairs. At one of those great staircase windows where the last of the twilight stood a sudden light of morning would not be surprising. Of course a letter;

She paused for a moment on the thought. A man’s reading was not reading; not a looking and a listening so that things came into the room. It was always an assertion of himself.

Men read in loud harsh unnatural voices, in sentences, or with voices that were a commentary on the text, as if they were telling you what to think

… they preferred reading to being read to; they read as if they were the authors of the text. Nothing could get through them but what they saw. They were like showmen. …

The long endurance in the cold room had led to nothing but the beginning of a day without strength—no one knowing what she had gone through. Three days and nights of nursing Eve had produced only a feverish gaiety.

It was London that killed you.

“I will come in at lunchtime,” she scribbled on the back of an envelope, and left it near one of the hands outstretched on the coverlet.

nobody outside, nobody left behind. When they had decided they would leave it, happy and serene, and glance at the invisible sun and make little confident jests together. She was like Mrs. Bailey—and someone farther back—mother.

This was the secret life of women. They smiled at God. But they all flattered men.

All these women. …