Edith Stein on the way to Auschwitz

For now, the world consists of opposites, but in the end none of those contrasts will remain. There will only be the fullness of love. How could it be otherwise.

 —Quoted in Thomas F. O'Meara, Erich Przywara, S.J. (2002)

'leaves ... brightly colored but torn away from the branches'

TOM

I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father's footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. I traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches.

—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1945)

'Thought and life are as the poles asunder.'

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. . . . Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

'so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable'

It was a fine night early in April. A myriad stars mingling with the light of a sickle moon, which again was enforced by the street lamps, made a light infinitely becoming to the human countenance and to the architecture of Mr. Wren. Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to animation. Thus it was that talk should be, thought Orlando (indulging in foolish reverie); that society should be, that friendship should be, that love should be. For, Heaven knows why, just as we have lost faith in human intercourse some random collocation of barns and trees or a haystack and a waggon presents us with so perfect a symbol of what is unattainable that we begin the search again.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

The echo of himself

Beside the window he saw his daughter's crib, the child asleep within, and drawing near he stood over her. Hardly breathing, he stared. He saw the line of her jaw, the small closed lids of her eyes. She is so perfect, he thought, so fresh and new. The moon-light is an angel in whose wings she breathes and sleeps. She was no longer than his forearm, and when he reached down her head fit into the palm of his hand. He smoothed her hair, then drew his hand back and folded his arms over the railing.

Here he beheld her, and in the lovely way of her form he found the echo of himself.

--Shann Ray, "The Way Home," American Masculine (2011)

Genius and the Lighthouse

[I]t must not be supposed that genius (but the disease is now stamped out in the British Isles, the late Lord Tennyson, it is said, being the last person to suffer from it) is constantly alight, for then we should see everything plain and perhaps should be scorched to death in the process. Rather it resembles the lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time; save that genius is much more capricious in its manifestations and may flash six or seven beams in quick succession (as Mr Pope did that night) and then lapse into darkness for a year or for ever. To steer by its beams is therefore impossible, and when the dark spell is on them men of genius are, it is said, much like other people.
 

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

Only Half-Alive

Unprepossessing in appearance—small and so strikingly thin that his clothes shrouded rather than covered him; his close-cropped hair, and wide, heavily lipped mouth, and eyes sunk deep into darkened sockets, lent him a gauntly simian look—George Tyrrell suffered more or less constantly from a sharp sting in the flesh. Severe migraine headaches and their accompanying nausea left him often prostrate days on end, only "half-alive," as he put it, unable to abide any human contact. Sick to his stomach so much, he ate carelessly and seldom, reducing himself to a virtual state of malnutrition and thus further aggravating his illness. The doctors solemnly warned him that mental fatigue from overwork brought about the pain and the bilious attacks, and yet it was only work that afforded him any lasting relief.

—Marvin R. O'Connell, Critics on Trial (1994) 

a jumble of paradoxes and contradictions

[George] Tyrrell, however—even leaving aside ideological differences—did not always prove an easy colleague or companion. He was a jumble of paradoxes and contradictions. At once self-doubting and self-righteous, continually examining his own motives and those of others, introspective and intense, sad in the peculiarly self-absorbed way a Celt is sad, he was wistful around animals and often intolerant of human beings. Yet he could be, even so, warm and funny and outgoing, not just affectionate and indulgent, but capable of identifying himself with others and winning their abiding loyalty to a remarkable degree. But even this apparently endearing quality upset his tender conscience, made him feel guilty of what he called himself his "duplicity," his "chameleon-like" temperament, because such accommodation seemed to fly in the face of his uncompromising and oft-proclaimed dedication to abstract truth.

—Marvin R. O'Connell, Critics on Trial (1994) 

'our more gradual and doubtful age'

The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently, or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness. Translating this to the spiritual regions as their wont is, the poets sang beautifully how roses fade and petals fall. The moment is brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be slept by all. As for using the artifices of the greenhouse or conservatory to prolong or preserve these fresh pinks and roses, that was not their way. The withered intricacies and ambiguities of our more gradual and doubtful age were unknown the them. Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers'. Plucked they must be before nightfall; for the day was brief and the day was all.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)