For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else’s, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth”.
The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
You are safe with me.””I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.
History, writing, infect after a time a man’s sense of himself…
Contemporary’ was in those days [1953] synonymous with ‘modern’ as it had not been before and is not now [1977].
A metamorphosis… The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.
Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying.
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.
You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.
There are things, also, that are memories as essential and structural as bones in toes and fingers.
But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.
As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him.
That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.
Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.
All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.
She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
You will not be here–I shall not be here–much lo