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Updated December 12, 2000
Created August 15, 1997
1. 26 "Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry crannies are wetted; my cold body is warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water descends and sheets me like an eel. . . . Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mind; down showers the day --- the woods; and Elvedon; Susan and the pigeon. Pouring down the walls of my mind, running together, the day falls copious, resplendent."
2. 239 - 240 ". . . out shot, right, left, all down the spine, arrows of sensation. And so, as long as we draw breath, for the rest of time, if we knock against a chair, a table, or a woman, we are pierced with arrows of sensation --- if we walk in a garden, if we drink this wine. . . . Then, there was the garden and the canopy of the currant leaves which seemed to enclose everything; flowers, burning like sparks upon the depths of green; a rat wreathing with maggots under a rhubarb leaf; the fly going buzz, buzz, buzz upon the nursery ceiling, and plates upon plates of innocent bread and butter. All these things happen in one second and last forever."
3. 36 "When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook --- a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases."
4. 67 "Louis and Nevell," said Bernard, "both sit silent. . . . Both feel the presence of other people as a separating wall. But if I find myself in company with other people, words at once make smoke rings . . . . I do not believe in separation. We are not single."
5. 68 "The human voice has a disarming quality --- (we are not single, we are one)."
6. 68 "I have little aptitude for reflection. I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world. A good phrase, however, seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude."
7. 69 "I look in all my pockets. These are the things that for ever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this very moment exactly."
8. 76 ". . . it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard in public, bubbles; in private, is secretive. . . . They do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts of Bernard."
9. 80 "The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people."
10. 84 "I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say I have observed. More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images."
11. 112 - 113 ". . . I am at liberty now to sink down, deep, into what passes, this omnipresent, general life. . . . I have no ambition. I will let myself be carried on by the general impulse. The surface of my mind slips along like a pale-grey stream reflecting what passes. . . . We insist, it seems on living. Then again, indifference descends. . . . And, what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found my self caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar --- forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. . . . beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence."
12. 114 "But I am aware of our ephemeral passage."
13. 116 "To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is myself."
14. 116 "I think of people to whom I cold say things; Louis; Neville; Susan; Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness."
15. 122 - 123 "Here is Percival . . . . He is a hero. . . . We who yelped like jackals biting at each other’s heels now assume the sober and confident air of soldiers in the presence of their captain."
16. 132 "Had I been born," said Bernard, ‘not knowing that one word follows another I might have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is, finding sequences everywhere, I cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness --- I am nothing."
17. 133 ". . . my character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are."
18. 134 "But I shall have contributed more to the passing moment than any of you; I shall go into more rooms, more different rooms, than any of you. But because there is something that comes form outside and not from within I shall be forgotten; when my voice is silent you will not remember me, save as the echo of a voice that once wreathed the fruit into phrases."
19. 152 - 153 "Such is the incomprehensible combination," said Bernard, "such is the complexity of things, that as I descend the staircase I do not know which is sorrow, which joy. My son is born; Percival is dead. I am upheld by pillars, shored up on either side by stark emotions; but which is sorrow, which is joy? I ask, and do not know, only that I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world."
20. 156 "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. . . . My own infirmities oppress me. There is no longer him to oppose them."
21. 184 "And time," said Bernard, "lets fall its drop. the drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. . . . Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day’s work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, ‘What is lost? What is over?’ . . . . I said . . . ‘I have lost my youth.’"
22. 184 "This drop falling has nothing to do with losing my youth. This drop falling is time tapering to a point. Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendent. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls. These are the true cycles, these are the true events. Then as if all the luminosity of the atmosphere were withdrawn I see to the bare bottom."
23. 185 "The truth is that I am not one of those who find their satisfaction in one person, or in infinity. . . . My being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people."
24. 187 "I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?"
25. 189 "Leaning over his parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words."
26. 216 "I have sons and daughters. I am wedged into my place in the puzzle."
27. 218 ". . . I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower."
28. 224 "Drop upon drop," said Bernard, "silence falls. It forms on the roof of the mind and falls into pools beneath. For ever alone, alone, alone, --- hear silence fall and sweep its rings to the farthest edges. Gorged and replete, solid with middle-aged content, I, whom loneliness destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop. . . . As silence falls I am dissolved utterly and become featureless and scarcely to be distinguished from another. It does not matter. What matters?"
29. 225 "I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space."
30. 227 "And we ourselves, walking six abreast, what do we oppose, with this random flicker of light in us that we call brain and feeling, how can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence? Or lives too stream away, down the unlighted avenues, past the strip of time, unidentified."
31. 229 "The flower," said Bernard, "the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives."
32. 234 "Listen. There is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding. That is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up --- sober, merciful word which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone. How we worship that sound like the knocking together of trucks in a siding!"