The Nice and the Good

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.

There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.

A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart.

Why do I always have to be helping people . . . and getting no help myself?

He also wanted to destroy something, everything, perhaps himself.

She thought sadly, gaiety and laughter are not in my destiny.

But she felt that she had to see him or she would die.

You can't kiss me and vanish.

I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn't know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long.

I am just a past with no present.

There's no point in talking it over. It would only make things worse. There's nothing to say. I just love you. That's all of it." "That's half of it," said Ducane. "Possibly over dinner I might tell you the other half.

I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.

I might say too that you are the person who ought to help me, since you do bear some responsibility for having awakened in me such an immense, such a truly monstrous degree of love.

Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.

You can't imagine what it's like when every moment you're conscious you're in the most frightful pain.

A woman in love is a great spiritual force.

Sometimes I just feel so shut in, with all those people and they've all got something while I've got nothing.

Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself.

Sex comes to most of us with a twist.

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.

Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

You are sad." "I am always sad.

It's so sad, all our house seems broken apart, everyone is going.

I'm falling in love with you again, most terribly in love." "I've never been out of love with you, never for a second.

The calmness was the final tone of despair.

The whole thing, the way it all happened, was shattering. And what it shattered most of all was some conception I'd had of myself, some wholeness.