“Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.”

I don’t think I can marry, I’m not fit for it, I’m not real enough. That’s the trouble. I’m a puppet that’s realised what’s wrong with itself and it’s horrible. I’m propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I’m propped up crying in a corner.

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.

That doesn’t sound like you, you ride every wave. There is one that will drown me

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.

I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.

An experience is richest not talked of.

We can only learn to love by loving.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

Don’t you get it? I’d live and die for you. You have my heart locked in prison. And yet you are my greatest source of freedom.

Broken wings may be grounded now, but they will taste freedom again.

I am tired of being tired. So I free the mind.

Run free little soul. You were never meant to be constrained.

I’m feeling the call of the feminine, the blessings of the moon falling on me, the chants of mother earth gettin’ me free.

I’ve said it a million times before and I’ll say it a million more I’d hate to be just like you all the damage you have done I’ve tried to undo I plan to set myself free from the branches of my family tree.

I believe the ashes of my past life were stepping stones to becoming free.

Living in a constant paradox, begging to be held and released by gravity, to be grounded and free. But my feet pressed against the earth yearn for the clouds above my fingertips adrift whispering I don’t want to be at the mercy of gravity.