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Updated August 15, 1997
Created August 15, 1997
1. 10 "Stones are cold to my feet," said Neville. "I feel each one, round or pointed, separately."
2. 24 "The apple-tree leaves became fixed in the sky; the moon glared; I was unable to lift my foot up the stair. He was found in the gutter. His blood gurgled down the gutter. His jowl was white as a dead codfish. I shall call this stricture, this rigidity, ‘death among the apple trees’ for ever. There were the floating pale-grey clouds; and the immitigable tree; the implacable tree with its greaved silver bark. The ripple of my life was unavailing. I was unable to pass by."
3. 31 "Those are laboratories perhaps; and that the library, where I shall explore the exactitude of the Latin language, and step firmly upon the well-laid sentences, and pronounce the explicit, the sonorous hexameters of Virgil; of Lucretius; and chant with a passion that is never obscure or formless the loves of Catullus, reading from a big book, a quarto with margins."
4. 70 "Let me at least be honest. Let me denounce this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world; these horse-hair seats; these coloured photographs of piers and parades. I could shriek aloud at the smug self-satisfaction, at the mediocrity of this world, which breeds horse-dealers with coral ornaments hanging from their watch-chains. There is that in me which will consume them entirely."
5. 86 "When there are buildings like these," said Neville, "I cannot endure that there should be shop girls. Their titter, their gossip, offends me; breaks into my stillness, and nudges me, in moments of purest exultation, to remember our degradation."
6. 120 "The door opens, the door goes on opening," said Neville, "yet he does not come."
7. 152 "I will not lift my foot to climb the stair. I will stand for one moment beneath the immitigable tree, alone with the man whose throat is cut, while downstairs the cook shoves in and out the dampers. I will not climb the stair. We are doomed, all of us. Women shuffle past with shopping-bags. People keep on passing. Yet you shall not destroy me. For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. tear me asunder. I sob, I sob."
8. 177 "Why, look," said Neville, "at the clock ticking on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. And we grow old. But to sit with you, alone with you, here, in London in this firelit room, you there, I here, is all."
9. 196-99 "I no longer need a room now," said Neville, "or walls and firelight. I am no longer young . . . Then I hear the one sound I wait for. Up and up it comes, approaches, hesitates, stops at my door. I cry, ‘Come in. Sit by me. Sit on the edge of the chair.’ Swept away by the old hallucination, I cry, ‘Come closer, closer.’"
10. 233 "We are in that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we have been severed. all else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing."