… I often fall down into nothingness.

Well: don’t think about it, and walk all over London; and see people and imagine their lives.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

[…] and I now lie in shaking despair, staring ceaselessly at the ceiling. I frightfully feel as though death’s particularly rotten kiss has always craved my mouth.

I have been in the dark; I have been hidden.

Something within her refused to grow. Something endless, eternal. Something bold. Something warrior-like. She looked up at the stars, she could feel, she felt as if she could pluck them one by one and send them spinning into the world, like small beautiful elastic mercurial weapons. Now too, the time is coming.

What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.

At last the faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.

The day had been long and very hot, and now that all the colours were blotted out the cool night air seemed to press soft fingers upon the eyelids, sealing them down.

How I devour solitude! I shall smell a red rose; shall gently surge across the lawn, light a cigarette, take my writing board on my knee; and let myself down like a diver, very cautiously into the last sentence I wrote yesterday. Then perhaps after twenty minutes, or even more, I shall see a light in the depths of the sea, and stealthily approach - for one’s sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over one sea pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it won’t be anything like what it was when I originally saw it, under the sea. Now these are the great excitements of life. Once I would have written this twice over; but now I can’t; It has to go, with its blood on its head. I have three days of solitude still. The others are packed with this damnable disease of seeing people. Please tell me what psychological necessity makes people to “go and see” so-and so? I never do. Do they resent obscurely, the effort that I make to be alone?