The Little Stranger

And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

I seem to have been cross, somehow, all the time when I was a girl. I was horrid... You're supposed to grow out of horridness, aren't you? I don't think I ever grew out of mine. Sometimes I think it's still inside me, like something nasty I swallowed that got stuck.

We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive.

Yes, Emily Dickenson -- a rather exhausting poet, now I come to think of it. All that breathlessness and skipping about. What's wrong with nice, long lines and a jaunty rhythm?

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let's call it a---a germ. And let's say conditions prove right for that germ to develop---to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy and malice and frustration...

modern dances always seem to me so vulgar. So much hopping about; like a scene from a mental ward!

I'm like a weather-vane, I start twitching when the wind's on the turn.

Her eyes were still closed, and in the darkness, in her dark dress and coat, she seemed an assemblage of angular fragments...

...I made what can only have been a few rather idiotic observations about the bricks.

...keeping their gimlet eyes on one's affairs...

He was just the sort of man to have faith in leeches. Leeches, and licorice, and cod-liver oil.