[When first we faced, and touching showed] When first we faced, and touching showed How well we knew the early moves, Behind the moonlight and the frost, The excitement and the gratitude, There stood how much our meeting owed To other meetings, other loves. The decades of a different life That opened past your inch-close… Continue reading Philip Larkin
There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. ― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim. (Broadview Press, November 7, 2000) Originally… Continue reading Joseph Conrad
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. ― George Eliot, Middlemarch. (Signet 2004) Originally published 1871.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily, half asleep, how we perished, each alone. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. (Pomona Press, January 1, 2006) Originally published 1927.
I, whom loneliness destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop. —Virginia Woolf, The Waves. (Harvest Books 1978) Originally published October 8th 1931.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley, from “A Defence of Poetry,” 1820, Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, ed. Melissa Kwasny (Wesleyan University Press, 2004)
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. — Virginia Woolf, Orlando. (Penguin Classic; Abridged edition, October 3, 2000) Originally published October 11th… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
