‘Why does she kill him?’ said Jim. ‘Why is she armed when he isn’t? Can’t she get the better of him any other way? And why get the better of him at all, if they’re in love? By killing him, she proves her inferiority. Or does she kill herself after?’
Kate answered:
‘Is there anything more beautiful than the red blood of the one who loves you?’ She added, ‘I’m in the very middle of your own red heart, Jim, and I want to drink and drink and drink.’
“
| — |
Henri-Pierre Roché, Jules et Jim
|
What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
“
| — |
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
|
She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time .
“
| — |
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
|
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?
— it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Bernard
To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. The authentics, like Louis, like Rhoda, exist almost completely in solitude.
Louis
We have tried to accentuate differences. From the desire to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults.
Neville
I am merely “Neville” to you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am immeasurable.
Jinny
I make you believe this is all.
Rhoda
The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us and we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent.
Susan
A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again.
“
| — |
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
|
because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn
“
| — |
Jack Kerouac, On The Road
|
My mother must have followed the drum, my father the sea.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
The grey house
…they went back to the house that they now knew heeded neither youth nor love- only those austere and incommunicable memories that they could never share.
——————————————————
Came a day in September, a day slashed wirth alernate sun and rain, sun without warmth, rain without freshness. On that day they had left the grey house, which had seen the flower of their love.
——————————————————
They must have pondered upon what they had done to one another, and they must each have accused themselves of drawing this sombre pattern through which they were tracing tragically and obscurely. At the last they were too far away for either to see the other’s tears.
—- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
And she was mine, she was mine, the key was in my fist, my fist was in my pocket, she was mine.
“
| — |
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
|
He wrote, I’m broke, please send for me
But I’m broken too and spoken for, do not tempt me
I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.
“
| — |
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
|
The strength that I will never be able to say
“
| — |
Crazy/Beautiful
|
She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.
“
| — |
Anais Nin, The Four Chambered Heart
|
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rupture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
“
| — |
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
|
Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames
“
| — |
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
|
