Great Throughts Treasury

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

"No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high."

"No passion hatching strongest man in the chest, the desire to make others think in their own way. Nothing obscures the sky so much of his happiness, nothing fills so much fury, as the knowledge that another holds a vile things of which he is cherished. Whigs and Tories, Liberals and Labor, for what fight - if not for their prestige? Not the love of the truth, but the desire for domination throws faction against faction, and makes you want to ruin a church of another parish. Everyone thinks in his belly to keep the figs and to subjugate the enemy, rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue."

"No, never say now, no one in this world, that they were this or that. She felt very young, and at the same time unspeakably old. As a razor passed through all; while kept out looking. He had a perpetual sense, as she watched the cars, being outside, alone and far out at sea; always felt it was very, very dangerous to live, for one day it was. Do not judge that smart, or too out of the ordinary. Nor could learn how life had gone through with the few fingers that had given him knowledge Fräulein Daniels. I knew nothing, nor language, nor history; rarely read a book now, except memoirs in bed, but as the absorbed everything, cars passing, and would not say to Peter, would not say of herself: I am this, I am what ."

"No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."

"No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low."

"No, on the man's chest tumulutoso, a passion stronger than impose their belief on others, nothing can take the root of your anger and fill such as knowing that one despises what he worships. [...] It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that pits one neighborhood to another neighborhood and makes a parish premedite ruin another parish. Everyone prefers peace of mind and the other holding the triumph of truth and the apotheosis of virtue."

"Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was."

"Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see all sorts of things--they see themselves..."

"Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window."

"Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose, she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, here--the sonnet. But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her. He was smiling at her, quizzically, as if he were ridiculing her gently for being asleep in broad daylight, but at the same time he was thinking, Go on reading. You don't look sad now, he thought. And he wondered what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him, if that were possible, to increase."

"Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them."

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."

"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."

"Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy."

"Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living."

"Nothing need be said; nothing could be said."

"Now forsake everything and now Mollero moorings. Now deliver the desire restrained and repressed because finlamente you can spend, you can consume. Galopperemo together over the desert hills where the swallow dips her wings in dark pools and columns rise up whole. Wave slamming on the beach, wave casting its white foam to the most remote corners of the earth, I throw my violets, my offering to Percival."

"Now as I climb this mountain, from the top of which I shall see Africa, my mind is printed with brown-paper parcels and your faces. I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smelt so unpleasant, too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the wastepaper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life."

"Now the terror is beginning. Now taking her lump 0£ chalk she draws figures, six, seven, eight, and then a cross and then a line on the blackboard. What is the answer? The others look; they look with understanding. Louis writes; Susan writes; Neville writes; Jinny writes; even Bernard has now begun to write. But I cannot write. I see only figures. The others are handing in their answers, one by one. Now it is my turn. But I have no answer. The others are allowed to go. They slam the door. Miss Hudson goes. I am left alone to find an answer. The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop 0f the figure is beginning to fill with time; it whole world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join-and seal up, and make entire."

"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, the falling fountains of the pendant trees. I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw with me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet."

"Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on forever; goes down to the bottom of the world -- this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light?"

"Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it ..."

"Now then is my chance to find out what is of great importance, and I must be careful, and tell no lies."

"Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground."

"Now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are."

"Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, Take it. This is my life."

"Now, through my own infirmity I recover what he was to me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not see the point of these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting, was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have lived long, and to have spread calm round him, indifference one might almost say, certainly to his own advancement, save that he had also great compassion... We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate. Nothing that has been said meets our case... After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire… I am yawning. I am glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the strain and the long, long time — twenty-five minutes, half an hour — that I have held myself alone outside the machine."

"O friendship, how piercing are your darts - there, there, again there."

"O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!"

"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order."

"Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read."

"Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own."

"Oh may the flood last forever. A virgin lip: no bungalows; as it was in the beginning. Now it’s lead grey with the red leaves in front. Our inland sea."

"Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight."

"Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep forever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters."

"Oh, to awake from dreaming!"

"Oh, I am in love with life!"

"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."

"On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points."

"Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart."

"Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself."

"Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless."

"Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody."

"One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold."

"One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see."

"One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that."

"One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June."

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes."

"One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year — but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex. at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to, buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre."