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aggressive moralised sexual disgust
appropriated victimhood with
In this book we see an author immediately interested in the stagecraft of the novel, by who speaks and what they sound like,
the authentic and inauthentic self, those who live inside and outside of norms, what different sorts of text mean to a reader,
somehow jarring against that male reasonableness.
The violence of his act is hidden within a reasonable tone that makes her anger dismissible as hysteria and in which any challenge to that reasonable male position is rude and hurtful, impolite.
A mutual deception that we are complicit in as readers, while thinking we see through it.
Many readers over the years have focused on the book’s ambiguity over whose ‘side’ you are on, and there is something important about society in that statement.
She is forcibly abducted, kidnapped and threatened with rape and murder, yes, but she’s quite pretentious about art and can be somewhat sharp-tongued. Let’s call it a draw.
perhaps I wanted to give fate a chance to stop me.
then having money and knowing she’d never look at me in spite of it and being lonely.
it. I mean having her real made other things seem nasty.
She often went on about how she hated class distinction, but she never took me in. It’s the way people speak that gives them away, not what they say.
I knew really I could never let her go away.
Everything’s sad if you make it so, I
‘We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.’
Only the things that I have to give anyway. The way I look and speak and move. But I’m other things. I have other things to
just like she never started it all in the first place.
All I did later was because of that night.
she didn’t see how to love me in the right way.
Alive in the way that death is alive.
Like falling off the edge of the world. There suddenly being an edge.
Do shut up. You’re ugly enough without starting to whine.
Ugliness v Beauty
People who would never see, feel, dance, draw, cry at music, feel the world, the west wind. Never be in any real sense.
Moranda is all about feelings
feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.
I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive’s.
He’ll be alone with all his sex neurosis and his class neurosis and his uselessness and his emptiness. He’s asked for it. I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.
A simply colossal effort of coming to terms with oneself. Like destroying all the paintings one’s ever done and making a new start. Only he had to do it every day.
as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.
It’s too complicated for set ideas.
Marianne is me; Eleanor is me as I ought to be.
There are moments when he is possessed, quite out of his own control.
He starts by being a nice little clerk and ends up as a drooling horror-film monster.
He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants.
The horrid old man Sinbad had to carry on his back. That’s what you are. You get on the back of everything vital, everything trying to be honest and free, and you bear it down.
And the few have to carry it all. The doctors and the teachers and the artists – not that they haven’t their traitors, but what hope there is, is with them – with us. Because I’m one of them.
this hateful millstone envy of the Calibans of this world.
this awful deadweight of the fat little New People on everything.
Vulgarizing everything.
But sometimes it is frightening, thinking of the struggle life is if one takes it seriously.
I shall become a Little Woman.
They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.
He doesn’t believe in any other world but the one he lives in and sees. He’s the one in prison; in his own hateful narrow present world.
It won’t be altogether a lie, I feel a responsibility towards him that I don’t really understand.
and I thought, anyhow I couldn’t face up to living here with him – just the domestic effort. A vile irrelevant wave of bourgeois cowardice.
The woman you will be, he said. A nice woman? A much more than nice woman.
You are sensitive, you are eager, you try to be honest, you manage to be both your age and natural and a little priggish and old-fashioned at the same time.
I thought I knew I didn’t love him. I’d won that game.
But God can’t hear. There’s nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him.
I still believe in a God. But he’s so remote, so cold, so mathematical.
