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"You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent mamma says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not live here with gentlemen's children like us..."
"What do I want? A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances: I want this because it is of no use wanting anything better...I could not tell: nothing answered me."
"I must dip my hand again and again in the basin of blood and water, and wipe away the trickling gore."
"It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel-walk, I faced the wreck of the chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; though community of vitality was destroyed--the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree--a ruin, but an entire ruin."
"If you think so, you must have a strange opinion of me: you must regard me as a plotting profligate--a base and low rake who has been simulating disinterested love in order to draw you into a snare deliberately laid, and strip you of your honour, and rob you of self-respect."
"Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment--not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow-creatures are--none that saw me would have a kind thought or good wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I wish to seek her breast and ask repose." |
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"I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content."
"While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze..."
"...was it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a troubled yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as spontaneous creation? Surely is was in this way that homer saw the plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter."
"Already I had begun to taste something of the horror that belongs to the lot of a human being whose nature is not adjusted to simple human conditions."
"I yearned to be assured of her love. The fear of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst."
"It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse no less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time."
"You have known the powerlessness of ideas before the might of impulse; and my visions, when once they had passed into memory, were mere ideas--pale shadows that beckoned in vain, while my hand was grasped by the living and the loved." |
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"This form of disease may, in one sense, be compared to the loss of the scarf-skin, a consequent exposure of surfaces for whose excessive sensitiveness, nature has provided a muffling. The loss of this covering is attended by an habitual impassibility, by influences against which we were intended to be guarded."
"'The fact is,' said Barton, 'whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this spiritual world--a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure--I know,'continued Barton, 'that there is a God--a dreadful God..."
"...a persecution which had made me fear death and the world beyond the grave as much as I have grown to hate existence."
"Send me away with some hope, however little, some faint hope of ultimate deliverance, and I will nerve myself to endure, from hour to hour, the hideous dream into which my existence has been transformed." |
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"Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmonpink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife."
"Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the same that burned upon his forehead." |
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| "We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison." |
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The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves, The brilliant moon and all the milky sky, And all that famous harmony of leaves, Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;
Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry. |
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'To be born a woman is to know--Although they do not talk of it at school-- That we must labour to be beautiful.
We sat grown quiet at the name of love; We saw the last embers of daylight die, And in the trembling blue-green of the sky A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell About the starts and broke in days and years.
I had thought of no one's but your ears: That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown As weary-hearted as that hollow moon. |
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| Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. |
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A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught is his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before in the indifferent beak could let her drop? |
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She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."
"And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life."
"Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way; much more real in another."
"He had committed an appalling crime and had been condemned to death by human nature."
"(they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe)"
"..a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves." |
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"How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air."
"Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue."
"I looked up at the over-familiar body, stretched in imaginary pain, the head drooping like a man asleep. I thought, sometimes I've hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn't loved him too? Oh God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?"
"If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience."
"She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast: he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn't move to plead his cause."
"For a month or two this year a ghost had pained me with hope, but the ghost was laid and the pain would be over soon. I would die a little more every day, but how I longed to retain it. As long as one suffers one lives." |
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"Tomorrow? What makes you think we're going to live that long?"
"Everything is seen at its best in the dark--including me. I love it. Can't understand why you're so scared of it.
I'm not frightened of the darkness outside. It's the darkness inside houses I don't like."
"Yes, a general without any army wouldn't be much use, would he? Can I see your eye? I mean can I see the hole?
There's nothing to see." |
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The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin A nuclear error, but I have no fear London is drowning-and I live by the river.
London calling, see we ain't got no highs Except for that one with the yellowy eyes
I never felt so much a'like |
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I am an anti-christ I am an anarchist Don't know what I want but I know how to get it
How many ways to get what you want I use the best I use the rest I use the enemy |
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Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
By god the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. |
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Once under the fold, down to the roots, nerve-hand holds for slicing level the parallel lines of a photo. Leaning deeper so the unconscious, deeper so the gore geometric be heaped up, I drop the silvery haft, the leg, lug back the flap.
I hear a cry from some of myself. So this is me. This jameen. This meat for which I war myself. This. |
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