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'Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little - even if one did once know what one meant, which at her age seems unlikely. There are ways and ways of trumping a thing up: one gets more discriminating, not necessarily more honest.'

The danger and addiction of journaling. Especially when it's aimless and dizzy, like mine.

'A...breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees round the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun - but the swans, the rims of ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter.'

'He was unaware that his conventional good looks were to a certain extent a substitute for amiability.'

Heeh!

From "Body Art":

'He couldn't really see her body in the furls of her clothing but he had held it in his arms, and it was young and tautly constructed. She had blue eyes and sky-blue painted lashes. Her veins in her thin arms were also very blue, as was a kind of traced tattoo like lacy flowers, that infested her lower arms like the evening mittens of Edwardian ladies.'

Oh.

'Leo: If there is any type to whom I am attracted - it veers toward women with doe eyes. And your eyes are more - they are more - thin - the light bounces off of them rather than into them. And I cannot see your soul hovering there, where I would like to. Your soul is locked somewhere inside your body, so I cannot see it. Another man could perhaps bring your soul outside your eyes but it's not me, I'm afraid.'

'Mrs. Givings: Mrs. Daldry, did you dream of love from a young age?

Mrs. Daldry: Yes.

Mrs. Givings: And what did you think it would be like?

Mrs. Daldry: I thought it would be - never wanting for anything. Being surrounded and lifted up. Like resting on water, for eternity.'

Heartrending.

'Mrs. Givings: We were just discussing breakfast. You know, in Italy they hardly eat breakfast. Just a little bit of sweet cracker to dip in very strong coffee. They eat something light to recover from the great passions they spent during the night. Better to skip breakfast and move on to lunch, a great big lunch, when the silence isn't quite so loud, no the silence is not quite so deafening at lunch.'

Poor thing.

'Mrs. Givings: Have you loved many women, Mr. Irving? Do you remember many - hands?

Leo: I have loved enough women to know how to paint. If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.

Mrs. Givings: Are poets required to love many women?

Leo: Oh, yes. Love animates every line.'

Be still, my beating heart.

'Leo: ...to express in my paintings. The memory - of the movement - of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas.'

I can feel, even now, the hands of Patrick, and Jonathan, and Atticus, and Rachael, and Mitchell, and Lydia, and my mother, and Daniel (there, though, only in relation to dance), and David, and Brooke.

Reminds me of Paul:

'Leo: Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance - they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved - the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish...(cont.)'

'Mrs. Givings: Most men would be - pale with rage!

Dr. Givings: Pale with rage, exactly, in a sentimental novel. My point is: this is not the end of a book. You made a mistake, that is all. The treatment I gave you made you excitable. It is my fault. A hand on the cheek, these are muscles, skin, facts. It needn't mean that one is preferred absolutely, or that one isn't loved. So why then jealousy?'

Why indeed?

'Dr. Givings: ...but it doesn't, it needn't.

Mrs. Givings: The writer of Madame Bovary was not a woman.

Dr. Givings: He was french, which is much the same thing.'

Oh snap.

'Dr. Givings: It is odd - for some husbands such things end in a screaming match or even in death, one hand on a cheek. It has come to mean an absolute thing: the end of a book, those dreadful Mrs. Bovary books - but how can it be absolute when there are so many shades and degrees of love? Lady novelists like for it to be a tragedy - because it means that the affair mattered. mattered terribly - (cont.)...'

'Mrs. Givings: We talk, we talk, and we surround ourselves with plants, with teapots, with little statuettes to give ourselves a feeling of home, of permanency, as if with enough heavy objects, perhaps the house will not fly away, but I experienced something the other day, Mr. Irving, something to shatter a statuette, to shatter an elephant.'

Welcome to the female orgasm, darling.

'Leo: Dark so early. Dark and the trees so tall and naked. I think November is the tallest month because when the trees have lost their leaves they look so much taller. Tall in a - lonely way.'

No YOU stop copying down every single one of Leo's lines!

'Mrs. Givings switches on the lamp.
Leo is riveted by Mrs. Daldry's fragile beauty in the light.

Leo: I must go. A thousand paintings. That is to say - a thousand apologies, as it were, for my rudeness at leaving so suddenly, I now have a thousand paintings to make. A bolt from the blue! I must order a new canvas. Several. Immediately. Good-bye.'

Darling!

'...A woman who is two-thirds done is nearer to God! A young woman on the verge of knowing herself is the most attractive thing on this earth to a man for this very reason.'

Yes, yes, I'm obsessed.

'Leo: Have you ever seen 'Virgin and Child with the Angels?

Mrs. Givings: I have never been to Italy.

Leo: Oh, you must go, and upon arrival, you must go directly to see that painting - the incomplete lines of God - they cannot be filled in because they would be too beautiful, they would shock the senses, and so they are almost there - women or angels - exchanging confidences - coming into being...(cont.)'

'Leo: Look - there - another window lit - golden - the rest of the house dark - an incomplete painting. I love incomplete paintings - why do painters always insist upon finishing paintings? It's unaccountable - life is not like that!'

I adore him.

'Leo: I love this time of afternoon, when the world is becoming dark, and you can see outside your window - lights in the neighboring windows coming on. One yellow - one almost white - little squares of light, other people's lives - sheltered against the night, so hopeful. Ridiculous, isn't it, to have so much hope, to think a little square of light could blot out the darkness - and yet - another comes on.'

Loveliness transitions quickly into hilarity:

'Mrs. Givings: Well perhaps you were right. Perhaps you ought not to have said.

Leo: Not that I've ever known any prostitutes - intimately -

Mrs. Givings: (overlapping with intimacy) I wasn't implying -

Leo: It's only a metaphor -

Mrs. Givings: Of course.

It is awkward.
They sit there, in the gathering darkness.'

I adore it all.

Lovely.

'Leo: Light without flame is like having relations with a prostitute. No flame of love or desire, only the outer trappings of - the act. And without love - without the mental quickening - the eyes - the blood - without the heart - or intellect - bodies are meat. Meat and bone and levers and technicalities.'

'Leo: Her soul lept of her eyes. When I painted her I felt I could paint souls. Her soul hovered, just here, and I could see it.'

I like him.

Immediately followed by:

'Dr. Givings: What men do not observe because their intellect prevents them from seeing would fill many books.'

Preach.

'Leo: I wished to avoid the fate of my boyhood friend. On his wedding night he was repulsed by his wife's body. He said, when she disrobed for the first time, he saw something monstrous. What, what? I asked. She had body hair, he said, down there! Like a beast! You see, he had seen the female form only in marble statues - no body hair! You are a scientist, that must amuse you.'

On the development of electricity:

'Mrs. Givings: To blow out a candle - how beautiful! With one's own breath, to extinguish the light! Do you think our children's children will be less solemn? A flick of the finger - and all is lit! A flick of the finger, and all is dark! On, off, on off! We could change our minds a dozen times a second! On, off, on off! We shall be like gods!'

Mrs. Daldry: I'm afraid so.'

I love this. The delivery of just one furious line is left entirely to the actress. Ruhl doesn't even punctuate:

'Mrs. Givings: Yes it is very boring good-bye and don't kiss me good-bye please.

Dr. Givings: Very well.

He leaves.
She storms.'

'Mrs. Givings: When I gave birth I remember so clearly, the moment her head was coming out of my body, I thought: why would any rational creature do this twice, knowing what I know now? And then she came out and clambered right on to my breast and tried to eat me, she was so hungry, so hungry it terrified me - her hunger. And I thought: is that the first emotion? Hunger?'

'Mrs. Givings: I don't want to lie down. I want to feed my own baby.

Dr. Givings: But you can't love. Your milk isn't adequate.
I love you.'

Ooooh, that bit. That's meant to be reassuring but makes you unendurably sad.

Mrs. Givings: I would love to have a great big brood, all climbing over the furniture, furniture is so dead, that is to say so lifeless, I mean so sad, without children.'

She's described by everyone as blooming and healthy and whatnot, but her lines suggest more 'hysteria' than any other characters' so far. Purposeful? I believe so.