Quotes from book

The Waves

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

“Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder.
I sob, I sob.”

“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

“But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.”

“For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.”

“You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?”

“I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers — the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that.”

“Now, through my own infirmity I recover what he was to me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not see the point of these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting, was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have lived long, and to have spread calm round him, indifference one might almost say, certainly to his own advancement, save that he had also great compassion. […] We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate. Nothing that has been said meets our case. […] After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire. […] I am yawning. I am glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the strain and the long, long time — twenty-five minutes, half an hour — that I have held myself alone outside the machine.”

“When you are silent you are again beautiful.”

“There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…”

“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.”

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.”

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

“O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!”

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.”

“I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.”

“Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”

“Oh, I am in love with life!”

“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.”