Olivia Quotes

“Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instil its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“But there was no need of wine to intoxicate me. Everything in her proximity was intoxicating.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I understand," I cried to myself, "I understand at last. Life, life, life, this is life, full to overflowing with every ecstasy and every agony. It is mine, mine to hug, to exhaust, to drain.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“And now I understood that it was that difference that I wanted.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I have often wondered what share Racine had in lighting the flame that began to burn in my heart that night, or what share proximity. If she hadn't read just that play or if she hadn't called me up by chance to sit so near her, in such immediate contact, would the inflammable stuff which I carried so unsuspectingly within me have remained perhaps outside the radius of the kindling spark and never caught fire at all? But probably not; sooner or later, it was bound to happen.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I would be better for my love, for my pain. Even the pain of absence—so I vowed with clenched teeth—should make me better not worse.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought—no, felt—supremely worth while, and I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others. But at that time, I was innocent, with the innocence of ignorance, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was without consciousness, that is to say, more utterly absorbed than was ever possible again. For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: ‘Is this real? Is this sincere?’ All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: ‘Literature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about!’ And then I would add, ‘But so Mercutio jested as he died!”
― Dorothy Bussy, Olivia

“So, I consumed my heart with love and resentment, my eyes with hot, slow tears.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“But more often I tried to think what had been the meaning of her attitude to me. [...] She had seemed to be fond of me. At moments I had dared to think she had loved me. Why had she treated me so at the end? Had I offended her? Had she changed? That was more probable. She had remembered that the only person she had ever loved was the dead woman on the bed. She hated me for having dared intrude into that privacy, for having thrust upon her a love she resented. But yet, I thought, why? why? Had I not been humble? Had I ever asked or wanted more than kindness? Had I ever dreamt that more was possible from her to me? Sometimes an uneasy conscience murmured "yes".”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“And still, do what I would, hope came to interfere with my thoughts, my resolves. How hard it is to kill hope!”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I saw last night that one can't kill oneself without killing too many other things beside. I've done enough harm in my life already.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“[...] hardly knowing where I was, except that I was in comfort, my head sank on to her shoulder and I slept.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I was with her, beside her, for ever close to her, in that infinitely lovely, infinitely distant star, which shed its mingled rays of sorrow, affection and renouncement on the dark cold world below.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“It was to me she was reading. I knew it. Yes, I understood, but no one else did. Once more that sense of profound intimacy, that communion beyond the power of words or caresses to bestow, gathered me to her heart. I was with her, beside her, for ever close to her, in that infinitely lovely, infinitely distant star, which shed its mingled rays of sorrow, affection and renouncement on the dark cold world below.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“And so these odious questions of material interest had to be debated when hearts were breaking.
When hearts were breaking...”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I was no longer alone. She was with me—beside me. She had said "us". She had lifted me to her star.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“And then in a whisper, she added, so low that I could hardly hear it: "Je t'aime bien, mon enfant." Her voice broke and sank and then, lower still, she added, "Plus que tu ne crois." With that she was gone. The door shut and I was alone.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I had never thought about my body till that minute. A body! I had a body—”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“My indefinite desire was like some pervading, unlocalized ache of my whole being.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“[...] "for now, there's you.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“[there were] moments when it wasn't respect I wanted but something more—human, I called it.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“Why," said Laura, looking at me with her clear, untroubled eyes, which had a kind of wonder and a kind of recoil in them: "there's nothing else. I just love her.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“The train was generally empty at that time. Mlle Julie would lean back in a corner of the dimly lighted carriage and I liked to sit opposite and look at her. I could often do so for a long time without indiscretion, for her eyes were shut. No, she wasn't asleep, but tired. I watched the eyelashes on the cheek, the soft resting eyelids. Was it tired she looked? Not so much tired as sad. Not so much sad as serious. No, it wasn't bitterness in the curving corner of her lips, but an extraordinary sweetness, an extraordinary gravity, an extraordinary nobility. What were her thoughts? Behind those closed lids, what was going on? What had her life been? Had she suffered? She must have suffered to look so grave. Had she loved? Whom had she loved? I think the passion that devoured me at the time was the passion of curiosity. Once, as I was watching her like this, she suddenly opened her eyes and caught me. Her glance held me for a moment, and I was too fascinated to look away. Her glance was piercing, not unkind but terrifying. She was searching me. What did she see?
"Come," she said at last. "Come here and sit beside me."
I think she said it to get rid of my intolerable gaze. After I had obeyed, she put her hand on mine for the space of a heartbeat. I turned my eager palm to clasp it, but she withdrew it gently and sank back again into her corner and her reverie.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“—a world in which everything was fierce and piercing, everything charged with strange emotions, clothed with extraordinary mysteries, and in which I myself seemed to exist only as an inner core of palpitating fire.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“There was something, I thought, very lovely in this habit of the French language which gives it an added grace, tenderness, nuance, sadly lacking in English, with its single use of "you".”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“It was I alone who loved—it was I alone whose love was an impossible fantasy.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“concentration of mind comes from long discipline and sternly acquired habit”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I went to bed that night in a kind of daze, slept as if I had been drugged and in the morning awoke to a new world—a world of excitement—a world in which everything was fierce and piercing, everything charged with strange emotions, clothed with extraordinary mysteries, and in which I myself seemed to exist only as an inner core of palpitating fire.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“One day, I suddenly heard her voice as if she were speaking to me. A sentence came back to me I had forgotten. The voice said, earnestly, solemnly:
"Believe, Olivia, believe, I don't want to harm you."
There descended on me then a sudden and almost magic calm. Grace touched me mysteriously. The stifling, blinding clouds rolled away from my heart, from my eyes; I was able to breathe, to see once more. I was saved.
That night, I wrote her a letter. I told her that I had hated her, that that had been the worst of my pain, but that now I was reconciled to her, to life. I loved her again with all that was best in me. I was going to be happy; I was going to work, to live. I was going to try again.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia