I’m Still StandingElton JohnYou could never know what it’s likeYour blood like winter freezes just like iceAnd there’s a cold lonely light that shines from youYou’ll wind up like the wreck you hide behind that mask you useAnd did you think this fool could never winWell look at me, I’m coming back againI got a [...]

  My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and [...]

`…it is not drawn with the free lines of a free man; it has the half-witted secrecies of a hunted thief. It does not look merely like a picture of Fagin; it looks like a picture by Fagin.‘ (G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens, 1906)‘Do you hear me, some of you? He has been the- the- [...]

The Artist“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.  It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives.It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, [...]

How fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale–as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick [...]

Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of pure joy which filled every nerve of her body fully [...]

1. A Haunted House WHATEVER hour you woke there was a door shunting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.   1  “Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered “Quietly,” they said, “or we [...]

There is definitely a correspondence or synchronicity here.  “Until I was in the forties—I could settle the date by seeing when I wrote To the Lighthouse, but am too casual here to bother to do it—the presence of my mother obsessed me.  I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or [...]

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always [...]