To be a good actor ... it is necessary to have a firmly tempered soul, to be surprised at nothing, to resume each minute the labor...ious task that has barely just been finished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt Drag out to their last dregs and I resume... On such legs as are left me, in such heart As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In vain to me the smiling Mornings shine, And redd'ning Phoebus lifts his golden Fire:... The Birds in vain their amorous Descant join; Or cheerful Fields resume their green Attire:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job an...d a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Can one thus resume one's self? Can one know one's self? Is one ever somebody? I don't know anything about it any more. It now see...ms to me that one changes from day to day and that every few years one becomes a new being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
MY DEAR FRIEND,--I believe a good many conversations with you were left in an unfinished state, and now indeed I don't know where ...to take them up. But I will resume some of the unfinished silence. I shall not hesitate to know you. I think of you as some elder sister of mine, whom I could not have avoided,--a sort of lunar influence,--only of such age as the moon, whose time is measured by her light. You must know that you represent to me woman, for I have not traveled very far or wide,--and what if I had?... You have helped to keep my life "on loft," as Chaucer says of Griselda, and in a better sense. You always seemed to look down on me as from some elevation,--some of your high humilities,--and I was the better for having to look up. I felt taxed not to disappoint your expectation; for could there be any accident so sad as to be respected for something better than we are? It was a pleasure even to go away from you, as it is not to meet some, as it apprised me of my high relations; and such a departure is a sort of further introduction and meeting. Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born--a hundred million years--and I have suffere...d more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »