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| Learning to write is the beginning of life |
VALE
Enemies of Promise
“…in spite of the slow conversion of
progressive ideas into the fact of history, the dark ages have a way of coming
back.”
“I could not imagine a moment when I
should not be receiving marks for something, when ‘poor’ or ‘very fair’ or
‘Beta plus’ was not being scrawled across my conduct-sheet by the Great
Examiner.”
“12 July. Life should be lived, wildly
and feverishly within, outwardly with absolute calm and composure.”
“Time itself works against us. The
moments that are evil it eternalizes; the moments that might be good it hurries
to annihilation. All that is most precious is most precarious…The winged
psyche, even at the moment of birth, is sick with the pangs of dissolution.”
Connolly: Journal
“…I existed to celebrate my sense of
guilt.”
“Idleness only a coarse name for my
infinite capacity for living in the present.”
“…just as we may suddenly look with
passion at someone who has deceived us before the memory of their infidelities
swarms in on us again.”
“I felt a slight sense of mockery and
waste – how much of my mind and youth and tenderness had I poured into those
now emptied receptacles.”
“ I am tired of acquaintances, and
tired of friends unless they’re intelligent, tired also of extrovert unbookish
life. Me for good talk, wet evenings, intimacy, vins rouges en carafe, reading, relative solitude…”
“Writing is an accident arising out of
certain unhappinesses.”
“A romantic converted to realism loses
his faith not only in his creed but in himself.”
“22nd. Wet day – spent in
bookshops.“
“No cause is lost today as that of
pleasure.”
“There is an integrity in true
worldliness which a saint would envy.”
“…febrile flourishes…”
“…the natural lubricity of
adolescence.”
