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'She had yet to learn how often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.'

I feel fortunate to have a best friend with whom I can still share both.

'...darkening chimneys, viaducts, villas, glass-and-steel factories, chain stores seem to strike as deep as natural rocks, seem not only to exist but to dream. Atoms of light quiver between the branches of stretching-up black trees. It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt.'

I CANNOT HANDLE THIS OR MYSELF.

'...away up the street. In cities the traffic lightens and quickens; even buildings take such feeling of depth that the streets might be rides cut through a wood. What is happening is only acknowledged between strangers, by looks, or between lovers. Unwritten poetry twists the hearts of people in their thirties. To the person out walking that first evening of spring, nothing appears inanimate, nothing not sentient...

'No moment in human experience approaches in its intensity this experience of the solitary earth's. The later phases of spring, when her foot is in at the door, are met with conventional gaiety. But her first unavowed presence is disconcerting; silences fall in company--the wish to either be alone or with a lover is avowed by some look or some spontaneous movement--the window being thrown open, the glance...' (cont.)

'It is about five o'clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes--autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day....There is perhaps no sunset, the trees are not yet budding--but the senses receive an intimation, an intimation so fine, yet striking in so directly, that this appears a movement in one's own spirit. This exalts whatever feeling is in the heart.'

(cont.)

'Lilian was bilious in lessons and had to go out, she says when she has feelings it makes her bilious.'

You and me both, honey. Stupid feelings. (Also, I should share this quote with Atticus.)

'Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly - through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth.'

'The impetus under which he seemed to move made life fall, round him and her, into a new poetic order at once. Any kind of policy in the region of feeling would have been fatal in any lover of his - you had to yield to the wind. Portia's unpreparedness, her lack of policy...with Eddie stood her in good stead. She had no point to stick to, nothing to unlearn.'

Familiar, but distant enough to be comfortable.

"'You must never make me feel you don't understand.'
'What would happen if I did make you feel I didn't?'
Eddie said: 'I should stay unreal for ever.'"

Eddie reminds me of an ex (the first one, of course - of course). The resemblance is striking and embarrassing.

'Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives - or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.'

Gah why are you perfect, Bowen?

'There is no fidelity like the fidelity of the vicarious lover who has once seen a kiss.'

'There was, of course, his courage - something now with no context, no function, no outlet, fumbled over, rejected, likely to fetch nothing. Makes of men date, like makes of cars; Major Brutt was a 1914-18 model: there was now no market for that make.'

Possibly the most tragic character in this novel.

'She felt it must be very late, past midnight: that point where the river of night flows underneath time, that point at which occurs the mysterious birth of tomorrow.'

Poetry.

'Up to now, she had sat erect, partly judicial, partly as though her body were a vaseful of memory that must not be spilt - but now, as though to shift the weight of the past, she put a hand on the bed, the far side of Portia's body, and leant heavily onto it so that she made an arch.'

There's this terrifying accusing loving holiness about Matchett. I enjoy reading her strange selective compassion.

'The impassive solemnity of her preparations made a sort of altar of each bed: in big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.'

Matchett enchants me.

'The closeness she felt to Eddie, since this morning (that closeness one most often feels in a dream) was a closeness to life she had only felt, so far, when she got a smile from a stranger across a bus. It seemed to her that while people were very happy, individual persons were surely damned.'

I love the idea of a first love being the same as the surge of love for a stranger. The possibilities are what matter.

'She belonged to a junior branch of emotional society, in which there is always a crisis due....[Portia] had watched life, since she came to London, with a sort of despair - motivated and busy always, always progressing: even people pausing on bridges seemed to pause with a purpose; no bird seemed to pursue a quite aimless flight. The spring of the works seemed unfound only by her.'

Poor thing.

'She could not keep her thoughts at face-and-table level; they would go soaring up through the glass dome.'

Familiar, enchanting.

'It is heady - when you are so young that there is no talk yet of the convention of love - to be singled out: you feel you enjoy human status.'

That fantastic transition into a self under adult consideration.

'Portia had learnt one dare never look for long. She had those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere, that learn shyness from the alarm they precipitate. Such eyes are always turning away or being humbly lowered - they dare come to rest nowhere but on a point in space; their homeless intentness makes them appear fanatical. They may move, they may affront, but they cannot communicate.'

My unfortunate spirit animal.

Some more fun personification:

'But London, these nights, has a provincial meanness bright lights only expose. After dark, she is like a governess gone to the bad, in a Woolworth tiara, tarted up all wrong. But a glamour she may have had lives on in exiles' imaginations.'

'They were married: Thomas discovered himself the prey of a passion for her, inside marriage, that nothing in their language could be allowed to express, that nothing could satisfy.'

How sad that the man who feels this way toward his wife - the one wives crave - attaches himself to a woman too practical for either of them to appreciate one another's sentiments.

'Meanwhile, he said to himself in a quoting voice: "We are minor in everything but our passions."

"Wherever did you read that?"

"Nowhere: I woke up and heard myself saying it, one night."

"How pompous you were in the night. I'm so glad I was asleep."'

This gave me an enormous giggle.

'Anna, touching her pearls with an undecided hand, said: "We can't all just sit around."'

An undecided hand. Never seen that adjective paired with that noun before. I love it.

'But she only looked through him, and Thomas felt the force of not being seen....What she did see was the pension on the crag in Switzerland, that had been wrapped in rain the whole afternoon. Swiss summer rain is dark, and makes a tent for the mind.'

I want a tent for my mind.

'He liked best, at this time of the evening, to allow his face to drop into blank lines. Someone there made him feel bound to give some account of himself, to put on some expression or another.'

Poor thing. I like emptying too.

'Her hand went up decidedly to the switch between the arches. Immediately, Anna's cut-glass lamp sprang alight over their heads, dropping its complex shadow on the white stone floor. Portia, her hat pushed back from her forehead, stood askance under the light; she and Matchett blinked; there followed one of those pauses in which animals, face to face, appear to communicate.'

I love this strange moment.

'The breath of raw air that had come in with Portia perished on the steady warmth of the hall.'

And again:

'Everywhere, she heard an unliving echo: she had entered one of those pauses in the life of a house that before tea time seem to go on and on.'

The beautiful, unusual personification. I adore it.

'It was one of those muddles without a scrap of dignity.'

This sums up a majority of my interactions.

I love reading about diarists in fiction. Always critical (and on point).

'There does not seem to be a single thing that she misses, and there's certainly not a thing that she does not misconstruct.'

Me to this day.