the romantic egotist

“But in fact, as we now see, Edgar all along represented the devouring force that will gnaw and worry Catherine to death, consuming flesh and spirit together. For having fallen into “heaven”, she has ultimately—to quote Sylvia Plath—"fallen / Into the stomach of indifference", a social physiology that urgently needs her not so much for herself as for her function.”

I try to picture her face, now. It’s there but it’s a blur. Like looking through water. The absence of detail aches.

When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness, I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, "Stay awhile." The light flows from their branches. And they call again, "It's simple," they say, "and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine."

“An honest examination of your beliefs is a lot like cleaning house (I’m using creative imagination here because I never clean my house). You have a lot of stuff in your house and it can all seem like very necessary stuff. But if you buy every item that catches your eye and take it home with you, it will pile up, block your doorway, and cut you off from the rest of the world. But if you regularly hold each item up to the light and ask, “why do I really have this? Is it helping me? Is this meeting my needs? Did this ever meet my needs? Do I really need to keep this or is it adding to the clutter and preventing me from being able to find the truly useful things I already have or could replace it with?” then you will live a life where you can breathe more easily, enjoy what you have, and freely invite people in. You clean your house and you move forward with the confidence that you own your stuff, and your stuff doesn’t own you. Stop letting your beliefs own you. Examine them closely. Keep what is honest and useful, throw away the clutter, and repair what is valuable yet damaged. Your beliefs are important, but they are not permanent. Remember, you didn’t always feel this way — about anything.”

I believe the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that it's to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish... A novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible, so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written.

i meant nothing by the lighthouse. one has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. i saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but i refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions—which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. i can’t manage symbolism except in this vague generalised way. whether its right or wrong i don’t know, but directly i’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.