Night and Day

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

What if I told you I’m incapable of tolerating my own heart?

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

There are some books that LIVE," she mused. "They are young with us, and they grow old with us.

She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine ...

She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.

Well, I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.

His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life...

and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.

What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?

I’ve done my best to see you as you are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense. That was why I asked you here, and it’s increased my folly. When you’re gone I shall look out of that window and think of you. I shall waste the whole evening thinking of you. I shall waste my whole life, I believe.

She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos.

Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...

With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.

What are you thinking of, Katharine?" he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words. "I was thinking of you--yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You've destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you? No, tell me--tell me from the beginning." Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude like a woman. She interrupted him gravely now and then. "But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose William hadn't seen you. Would you have gone to bed?" He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot. "But it was then I first knew I loved you!" she exclaimed. "Tell me from the beginning," he begged her. "No, I'm a person who can't tell things," she pleaded. "I shall say something ridiculous--something about flames--fires. No, I can't tell you." But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of the northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.

Have I never understood you, Katherine? Have I been very selfish?’ 'Yes ... You've asked her for sympathy, and she's not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not practical.

I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you.

You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can't separate me from the person you've imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it's being in delusion.

You’re going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we’re riding in a forest, or landing on an island —' 'No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics —

It won't seem to you nonsense in ten years' time,' said Mrs. Hilbery. 'Believe me, Katharine, you'll look back on this these days afterwards; you'll remember all the silly things you've said; and you'll find that your life has been built on them. The best of life is built on what we say when we're in love. It isn't nonsense Katherine,' she urged, 'it's the truth, it's the only truth.

To seek a true feeling among the chaos of the unfeelings or half-feelings of life, to recognize it when found, and to accept the consequences of the discovery, draws lines upon the smoothest brow, while it quickens the light of the eyes; it is a pursuit which is alternately bewildering, debasing, and exalting, and as Katherine speedily found, her discoveries gave her equal cause for surprise, shame, and intense anxiety.

But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-' 'Like lights in a storm-' 'In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind.

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she herself felt.

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot?

The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting.... Ah dear," she sighed, "well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn't so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.

To know the truth—to accept without bitterness

She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present.