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Sometimes the energy in a book contradicts its apparent message.
Yates, easter parade
tranquillity of extreme fatigue.
I’m always living as if something wonderful is going to crystallise some time in the future.
life has always been crude, unfinished, raw, tentative; and so have the lives of the people I have known well. It occurred to me, looking at this room, that the raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was valuable in it and I should hold fast to it.
“All self-knowledge is knowing, on deeper and deeper levels, what one knew before.”
“that I can’t pick up a newspaper without what’s in it seeming so overwhelmingly terrible that nothing I could write would seem to have any point at all?”
If people can imagine something, there’ll come a time when they’ll achieve it.”
so weakened was she as an independent being, to enjoy sitting at a table publicly without a man’s protection,
My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man.
you say we have, then we have. And if you say not, then not.” “So what you feel doesn’t count?” “Me? But Anna,
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.
perhaps the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I’ve reached the stage where I look at people and say—he or she, they are whole at all because they’ve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.”
he’s not really sorry, not really; his hysteria and the noise are a defence against feeling, because it’s too terrible, the guilt he would have to feel.) He
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching out for happiness.
They are tied by the closest of all bonds, neurotic pain-giving; the experience of pain dealt and received; pain as an aspect of love; apprehended as a knowledge of what the world is, what growth is.
But her whole life is oriented around an absent man for whom she is waiting. Her flat too big, for instance. Her mind is filled with shapes of the man who will enter her life, meanwhile she ceases to paint or to write. Yet in her mind she is still “an artist.” Finally a man enters her life, some kind of artist, but one who has not yet crystallised as one. Her personality as “an artist” goes into his, he feeds off it, works from it, as if she were a dynamo that fed energy into him. Finally he emerges, a real artist, fulfilled; the artist in her dead. The moment when she is no longer an artist,
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People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
It seems to me that if I can achieve some sort of self-discipline, instead of aimless reading, aimless thinking, I can defeat my depression.
“Well, judging from what we’ve seen happening in the last thirty years, in the democracies, let alone the dictatorships, the number of people in a society really prepared to stand against a current, really ready to fight for the truth at all costs is so small that…”
“Because in a society where not one man in ten thousand begins to understand the ways in which women are second-class citizens, we have to rely for company on the men who are at least not hypocrites.”
injustice and cruelty is at the root of life.
“We’ve got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.”
living is like going up a mountain: every time you go a little higher up, the view looks completely different.
