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I shall throw myself on a bank by the river and watch the fish slip in and out among the reeds. The palms of my hands will be printed with pine-needles. I shall there unfold and take out whatever it is I have made here; something hard.
I tremble, I quiver, like the leaf in the hedge, as I sit dangling my feet, on the edge of the bed, with a new day to break open. I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the beginning.’
This book is exquisitely poetic. What a great thing to express the joy of youth in a way that an actual youth would probably be totally incapable of
There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists.
But already these are not school fields; these are not school hedges; the men in these fields are doing real things; they fill carts with real hay; and those are real cows, not school cows.
He smiles at my reflection in the tunnel. My body instantly of its own accord puts forth a frill under his gaze. My body lives a life of its own. Now the black window glass is green again. We are out of the tunnel. He reads his paper. But we have exchanged the approval of our bodies.
Then I shall grow bitter and mock at them. I shall envy them their continuance down the safe traditional ways under the shade of old yew trees while I consort with cockneys and clerks, and tap the pavements of the city.
They do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard. I am abnormally aware of circumstances.
But you understand, you, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs—they have given up calling for a self who does not come),
A leaf falls, from joy.
And one day, taking a fine pen and dipping it in red ink, the addition will be complete; our total will be known; but it will not be enough.
(How much, let me note, depends upon trousers; the intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby trousers.)
She has not dressed, because she despises the futility of London.
No day will be without its movement. I shall be lifted higher than any of you on the backs of the seasons.
I want someone to sit beside me after the day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listenings, and its waitings, and its suspicions.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death—Percival—others through sheer inability to cross the street. I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
I really relate to Bernard 's sudden awareness of ageing. I think I was possibly almost as dramatic as him when he says, suddenly, "I have lost my youth."
They act their parts infallibly, and almost before they open their lips I know what they are going to say, and wait the divine moment when they speak the word that must have been written. If it were only for the sake of the play, I could walk Shaftesbury Avenue for ever.
I am never alone. I am attended by a regiment of my fellows.
No lullaby has ever occurred to me capable of singing him to rest.
What a great description of grief
those persistent habits of thought which make us irredeemably lop-sided—for
the feeling is so grandiose as to be absurd and one conceals it by jumping on to a bus or buying the evening paper,
Woolf so often has these phrases that make me go, "yes, that's exactly what I experience "
We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget. All that we might have been we saw; all that we had missed, and we grudged for a moment the other’s claim, as children when the cake is cut, the one cake, the only cake, watch their slice diminishing.
‘How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes.
