Awe

I put my head back and watched the sky along with him. It was black and very starry. Starry out there is not like in London. There, starry is an observable impossibility, and looking up is a gaze into infinity.

It isn’t a case of miracles not happening – it’s just a case of people calling them something else. Can’t you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn’t breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart’s not beating: he’s dead.

A thought: Sometimes the clouds and sunlight will form in a way you’ve never seen them do before, and your city will feel as if it’s another city altogether.

Like thunder, the stable clock struck four. Never did any earthquake so demolish a whole town. The gallery and all its occupants fell to powder. Her own face, that had been dark and sombre as she gazed, was lit as by an explosion of gunpowder.

I asked her if she was unhappy; she says it is not a question of happiness.

My mind then wandered.

As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind – of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their heart

Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight.

The infinitesimal place I take up is so tiny compared to the rest of space where I’m not, and which has nothing to do with me; and the portion of time given me to live is so negligible next to the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t – wh