Quotes
Listed here are favorite quotes, from Harriet Hume. Quotes that inspire, or give a strong visual image, or just admiration the author's use of words .... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ....
These notes were collected in celebration of Rebecca West's birthday: December 21, 1892 Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul. ~ Rebecca West In Harriet Hume: a London Fantasy , Rebecca West transports her reader with a tale of the polar opposites of mind and spirit, love and power (published 1929) READ the entire novel online Meet Rebecca West
She was, of course, as blooming as every woman is when a man has just proved that he loves her; that is to say, a fairy masseuse had patted her flesh into delicious infant contours on the cheekbones and had shaped her lips into a smile suited to approval of nothing less than divine conditions and left them bright as wet paint, as the bitten meat of cherries.
ReplyDeleteShe must be in league with formidable forces, he reflected with sudden gloom, if her fragility could carry positions one would judge impregnable save by the heaviest artillery. If that were so, would it not be certain that she despised him, and that the illumination to which he had been subject at the door was an explosion of mocking laughter?
ReplyDeleteWhen people seek complete knowledge of us it is ten to one they do it to find out the perfect place to shoot an arrow; so we acquire a habit of fearing those, who make that search.
ReplyDeleteWe have been shaken by the same pulse, and it was not a weak one.
ReplyDelete... their leaves at this evening hour looked more like flowers than leaves, being crudely aureate where the sunset struck them and a deep blue where it did not, and not like real flowers either, but such fantasy-engendered blooms as nymphs might use.
ReplyDeleteFor spring dies, summer dies, autumn dies, winter dies, the year is gone, another is come; for youth passes, ripeness passes, age passes, a generation’s gone, another is come. All is ended in a general levelling.
ReplyDeleteNo man on earth would ever surpass him in appreciation of her peculiar quality; would more ecstatically know her bland as a runnel of cream from the lip of a jug, and at the same time so wild and ethereal that she could not be the product of the tame human womb, but must have been begotten by a god in a wind-tost grove, and then again so primly perfect that she could not be the product of the crude human womb, but must have been worked by the finicking human hand, like fine needlework or old silver.
ReplyDeleteHe retreated a pace from the door, regarding it with loathing. Surely it is established as firmly as any article of our faith that the only occasion on which a door is not a door is when it is ajar. It has no license to be a lens through which the unseen can be seen, it has no permit to tamper with time and exhibit that which has not yet been encountered.
ReplyDeleteThe weakest little woman among the ducks, the most downtrodden wife of them all, who hardly dared call her quack her own, could not indulge her natural disposition to swim without making a V adamantine as an irrevocable decision on the nearly frozen lake. There was no wind-crisped water here, only ribbed glass.
ReplyDelete... although I had been transported out of my soul by your endearing attributes, I had never destroyed my address-book.
ReplyDeleteIts pages,” she remarked in an offhand manner, “were not blank.”
I went up to bed and slept a matter of nine hours. But before I did that, I remember, I stood for quite a time at the window, with my tired Grimalkin in my arms, while I watched the garden relax from the sharp brilliance of moonlight to the quaker shades of dawn, and thought of you as kindly as you could possibly have wished.
ReplyDeleteTis meanness that makes life fearful, ay, and death too. If I had just seen a great man struck down by the assassin’s knife I would have felt grief and horror, but not this desire to go down on all fours and vomit like a dog. Death would be different with an Abbey hushed, and the pomp of a public event. There is nothing upon which Fame cannot put a better face.
ReplyDeleteAre you not all occupied in finding a form of government which shall allow that invisible thing, the will of the people, to express its sense of the need for its own preservation, and its traditional knowledge of what subserves this or frustrates it; and which shall not be deflected from this end by the personal interests of any group?
ReplyDelete… And so, you see, there is the same difficulty in finding a perfect form by which that invisible thing, the form of human wisdom known as music, can express itself. To sit alone at one’s instrument is to be like an unlimited monarch. If one can so express one’s personal genius without let or hindrance, why so we can express our personal follies too. For self-criticism is the weakest form of criticism save among the saints, and artists have not time to be saints as well. An orchestral performance, on the other hand, has the defects of a democracy. The conductor’s task, in forcing so vast an organism to unify its conceptions of what it is rendering, is beyond the capacity of all but a few; and since the labour is parcelled out among so many it is inevitable that some should be given parts too small to hold their attention, and if so much as a grain of inattention lodge in the machinery of an artistic performance ’tis apt to throw it out of gear. But chamber-music! Ah, chamber-music!
ReplyDeleteHe would be pleased wherever they were lying, whether in the hot blue shadow, or in the rock-hard sunlight; that heap of tiny bones, shining like grey glass.
ReplyDeleteIn this quiet green temple of a room she was as proper as a swan on a lake.
ReplyDeleteYou yourself once explained that there was a mystical confusion of substance in us.
ReplyDeleteI am very sallow. It is as if the blood did not reach my skin by half an inch, which is possible enough, since the ambition that was the engine of my heart is broken down.
ReplyDelete