Transcendence or detachment, leaving the body, pure love, lack of jealousy — that’s the vision we are given in our culture, generally, when we think of the highest thing. . . . Another way to look at it is that the aim of the person is not to be detached, but to be more attached — to be attached to working; to be attached to making chairs or something that helps everyone; to be attached to beauty; to be attached to music.
It’s linkage I’m talking about, and harmonies and structures And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
In the people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some airplane overhead was what she loved; life; London, this moment in June.
I only talk about writing in the most mechanical fashion: good habits, bad habits, how to know when you’re working right, how to know when you’re working wrong. I almost never like to think about the aim. I assume the aim just comes out of the deepest part of your consciousness, if you’re serious about the job. There are purposes you can state, but it could be misleading to talk about them, because there are other deeper purposes that you can’t state.
The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
In the sea caves there’s a thirst there’s a love there’s an ecstasy all hard like shells you can hold them in your palm.
That was the first time it occurred to me that all my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun’s cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.
Nobody expects a man and a woman to reach the same corner at the same time.
Despite the light’s unusual manifestation, however, not one person has expressed any doubt whatsoever that it was a being, a being of light. Not only that, it is a personal being. It has a very definite personality. The love and warmth which emanate from this being to the dying person are utterly beyond words, and he feels completely surrounded by it and taken up in it, completely at ease and accepted in the presence of this being.
Just know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.
