aclassicalmess's Reviews (165)

The acknowledged lovers laughed and talked, the unacknowledged were silent.

This woman did not say “I feel so unhappy” in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her own, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.”

Latterly he had seen only life, felt only the great passionate person pulse of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammeled by those creeds which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate.

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.

The mutual link of our destinies is broken; we must be divided by seas - by land. The stars and the sun must not rise at the same period to us: he must not say, looking at the crescent of the setting moon, ‘Matilda now watches it fall.’ - No, all must be changed. Be it light with him when it is darkness with me! Let him feel the sun of summer while I am chilled by the snows of winter! Let there be the distance of the antipodes between us!

I have long been searching for someone, and that is a sign that I was looking precisely for you and that we were fated to meet now - now in my head thousands of valves have opened and I must set loose this river of words, or I will choke to death.