book bits

She absolutely refused to reveal his name or even his type of work (although she gave him to understand that he had been, in a sense, a man of genius) and Fyodor was secretly grateful to her for this, realising that a ghost with neither name nor environment would fade out more easily - but nevertheless he experienced pangs of disgusting jealousy which he strove not to probe, but this jealousy was always present just around the corner, and the thought that somewhere, somewhen, for all he knew, he might meet the anxious, mournful eyes of this gentleman, caused everything around him to assume nocturnal habits of life, like nature during an eclipse.

He became silent, looking with his blue eyes far beyond the field stretching away in the sun. I returned the miniature, wondering what in the world had made him open his heart to me. That was something I never did; it was dangerous. First it was dangerous if you ever felt like that about anything, because then you’d never get it or something or someone would take it away from you; then it was dangerous because nobody would understand you and they’d only laugh and think you were crazy.

For the rest, his lovesick state afforded him all the joy and all the anguish proper to it the world over. The anguish is acute, it has, like all anguish, a mortifying element; it shatters the nervous system to an extent that takes the breath away, and can wring tears from the eyes of a grown man.

There’s no end to this tunnel,” said Phyllis, – and indeed it did seem very long.
“Stick to it,” said Peter; “everything has an end, and you get to it if you only keep all on.”
Which is quite true, if you come to think of it, and a useful thing to remember in seasons of trouble, – such as measles, arithmetic, impositions, and those times when you are in disgrace, and feel as though no one would ever love you again, and you could never – never again – love anybody.

She had an uneasy feeling that it was rather sinful to set one’s heart so intensely on any human creature as she had set hers on Anne, and perhaps she performed a sort of unconscious penance for this by being stricter and more critical than if the girl had been less dear to her.

Do you see? There’s an aloneness you can catch like a disease and not get rid of. A wrongness - a wrongness you can never fix.

‘Every heart has a tone,’ she said to Charlie, ‘just as every bell has one. Your heart’s tone is more oppressive to hear, young man. It is hurtful to my ears, and your eyes hurt my eyes to look at them.’

She said: Woman and man are words other people use, not me. I’m not sure what I am. Some days I’m neither, or I’m nothing. On other days I feel I’m both. But men and women are so different, how can one person be both? Isn’t that what you’re thinking? Well I’m both and I’ve learned some things, to my cost, the kind of thing you’re better off not knowing if you mean to live in the world. For example I know something about love and how lovers want to consume and be consumed and disappear into each other. I know how they yearn to make two equal one and I know it can never be.

She said to herself, in a phrase that sounded well in her own ears, that sooner or later every woman must learn to fight her battles alone.

‘Well,’ said the visitor, ‘you can guess what happened after that.’ He wiped away a sudden tear with his right sleeve and went on. ‘Love leaped up out at us like a murderer jumping out of a dark alley. It shocked us both - the shock of a stroke of lightning, the shock of a flick-knife. Later she said that this wasn’t so, that we had of course been in love for years without knowing each other and never meeting, that she had merely been living with another man and I had been living with…that girl, what was her name…?’