“And, as doth be human, I brake my rule straightway in the beginning.”
Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 7
Source: The Great Gatsby
“And, as doth be human, I brake my rule straightway in the beginning.”
Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 7
Interview by Andrea Di Marcantonio
“My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.”
February, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
My Thoughts
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
“I am Manuel, and I follow after my own thinking and my own desire.”
Miramon, in Ch. IV : In the Doubtful Palace
Figures of Earth (1921)
Context: I am Manuel, and I follow after my own thinking and my own desire. Of course it is very fine of me to be renouncing so much wealth and power for the sake of my wonderful dear Niafer: but she is worth the sacrifice, and, besides, she is witnessing all this magnanimity, and cannot well fail to be impressed.
Explanation of Stanza 28 part 8
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: Against the window's still pallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and her night-veiled face. Closely I look at the share of sublimity which she bears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman, that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desire no longer throws me on her as it used to do. Is it habit? No, not only that. Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, perhaps between us two also. But there is more. There is not only the narrowness of rooms to bring us together. There is more, there is more! So I say to her:
"There's you."
"Me?" she says. "I'm nothing."
"Yes, you are everything, you're everything to me."