Djuna Barnes
(via awritersruminations; deviatesinc)
‘…she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life - one scratched on the wall. Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.’
“
| — |
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
|
‘I don’t suppose you understand me…’
‘But I quite understand you,’ I assured her promptly, adding with involuntary warmth, ‘Very likely, Madame Charlotte, I understand you better than anyone in the world.’
The smiling look in her eyes was my recompense.
‘That’s far from triffling, what you’ve just said. How nice that we know each other so little! We can talk about things one doesn’t talk about with friends. Friends…never dare to confess to each other what they really and truly lack…’
“
| — |
Colette, The Pure and the Impure
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And my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;
“
| — | H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Eurydice, pt.7 |
“Because I didn’t say good night—and I miss it so—please know now how much I love you. Gertrude dearest. Good night.”
A love letter from Gertrude Stein to Alice B. Toklas(via earlyfrost; awritersruminations)
That is why the better part of our memory exists outside ourselves, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged.
“
| — | Marcel Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin (via proustitute) |
“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.”
Happy Birthday, James Joyce
I wish that I had spoken only of it all.
“
| — | Gertrude Stein, from “Stanzas in Meditation” (via proustitute) |
