Quotes from Helen Waddell

Being a sick man is like being a log caught in a stream, Gilles. All the straws gather around it.

Truth has as many coats as an onion ... and each one of them hollow when you peel it off.

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.

At that memory, it seemed to Gilles that he opened a door into an empty house that had been firelit once, and now was naked rafters under the sky.

Even at its most spontaneous, [the Carmina ] has not the sudden miracle of the earliest vernacular ... It is the contrast between the thrushes in February and the violin.

There are natures doomed to be unfortunate, to find the bitter in the sweet.

But what was the desire of the flesh beside the desire of the mind?