Quotes About Doubleness

No--no other man is cursed With such doubleness of eye, They can hunger, they can thirst, But they know for what and why.

me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.

That we can act in the world not as we are "in reality" is, for Gurov, a very good thing. Our public life, "which was visible to everybody who needed to know about it, but was full of conditional truth and conditional deceit" was balanced by a private life, which was hidden from others and in which we are sincere. Doubleness is not duplicity. It is precisely the sincerity of what is hidden that makes tolerance so necessary and moral condemnation so difficult.

Still, some nights I grieved. I grieved as much at what I knew must be the fleeting nature of my present happiness as any loss, any past. We lived on some edge, if we ever lived on a rolling plain. Who knew what attack, what illness. That doubleness again. Like flying: the stillness and speed, serenity and danger.