"The human mind is not a delicate plant, I thought: on the contrary, it will survive almost anything..."
"I now find myself compelled to relate a piece of information which I decided to withhold, on the grounds that it was irrelevant, but I realize increasingly that nothing is irrelevant. I meant to keep myself out of this story, which is a laugh, really, I agree: I see however that in failing to disclose certain facts I make myself out be some sort of voyeuse, and I am too vain to leave anyone with the impression that the lives of others interest me more than my own."
"I had been making difficulties to him, and I always hate myself for that, and at the same time feel an ominous horror because it is always a sign that I am about to have a crisis of malice, weeping and exhaustion. I had felt it coming for days: I had been crouching inside the walls of my consciousness terrified to move too far or too violently in case they collapsed and left me looking at the wild beasts. In the pre-crisis days I feel like someone living in a paper house surrounded by predatory creatures. They believe the house is solid so they don't attack, but if I were to move they would the walls flutter and collapse and they would be on to me in no time."
"Odd that one doesn't mind being called insensitive, selfish, and so on, provided that one can entirely understand the grounds for the accusation. It should be the other way round; one should not mind only when one knows that one is innocent. But it isn't like that. Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it."
"It wasn't just that they kept the bread loose on the windowsill among the ashtrays, without a suggestion of a breadboard, and cooked in unwashed pans, and left stale Martini in the only teapot: I could have thought these habits endearing, if it hadn't been for the phoneyness of the whole setup. And these were such phoneys that I couldn't even pride myself on detecting them. I felt as though I were watching them all through the civil pages of one of Stephen's short stories about Bohemia. I hated the way they all felt it their duty to be rude, frank and blunt. I felt in relation to them as my probation officer friend no doubt felt in relation to me. Squalor has its degrees, like crime."
"Sunday is one of those days on which I expect to do typical, characteristic things - characteristic of myself, that is - yet usually end up doing things I don't want to do at all, going to places I loathe, and so on. This was a particularly bad patch: I seemed to spend my time seeing people I didn't care about, and talking about things that interested me only in mild journalistic way. I never saw anyone who could arouse a flutter of apprehension and excitement, and who would turn out unexpectedly, and I couldn't think of anyone that I really wanted to see more than anyone else."
"Immaturity is no good, and they made me feel immature, all those people, even those I could see through: they caught undertones I couldn't, though they didn't even know they were doing it. The thing is that I couldn't start to feel them in my terms because I couldn't really feel them in theirs, and one needs the double background. (...) Perhaps it is only me that takes refuge in things like chance, unchartered encounters, cars in the night, roads going anywhere so long as it's not somewhere that other people know better. You can't judge or despise or even really get at something that you don't know and haven't thoroughly got, because of the fear of despising it because it's not yours. The sour grapes principle, in fact. It applies to everything. Only when one has got everything in this life, when one is eaten up with physical joy and the extreme, extending marvel of existing, can one trust oneself one the subject of the soul."
"I would so like people to be free, and bound together not by need but by love. But it isn't so, it can't be so.""I remembered the first and only other time when I had seen them all three together. It had seemed significant even at the time, but I had thought it was significant only as itself, for what it was to me, then, in my life."
"It was so sad, that a girl like Gill should be beaten simply because she had taken a gamble on love. Because that did seem to be the reason. She had jumped in with her eyes shut, and she had got nowhere."
""It wasn't that he suddenly changed, or anything like that, it was just that I saw too much of him and too little of anyone else. It was being abroad that did it, because all the people we ever saw were his friends (...) and I had to spend hour after hour, meal after meal being civil to people in order to get them to do obscure things for him.""
""(...) God, what a fool I was, what fools women are, what fools middle-class girls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves...""
"I saw for her what I could never see for myself - that this impulse to seize on one moment as the whole, one aspect as the total view, one attitude as a revelation, is the impulse that confounds both her and me, that confounds and impels us. To force a unity from a quarrel, a high continuum from a sequence of defeats and petty disasters, to live on the level of the heart rather than the level of the slipping petticoat, this is what we spend our life on, and this is what wears us out. My attitude to the petticoat is firmer than hers, but I am exhausted nevertheless."
"I suppose it was possible that she wanted Stephen. It occured to me as the train began to slown down that perhaps she was in love with Stephen, and then it occured a second afterwards that since this was such an obvious explanation it would certainly have occured earlier if true. So I discounted the concept of love.""As I went to bed that night, I wondered why social events are for me such a sea of blood, sweat and tears, from which I salvage perhaps two floating words, set afloat by a providence which will not let me drown with empty hands."
"(..) I do admire as well as love her, though I have always believed love preferable to and exclusive of admiration."
""Whatever happens," she went on, "you can't buy the past. You can't buy an ancestry and a history. You have your own past, and the free will to deal with it, and that's all. It can't be bought with money.""
