Wolf Solent - pg. 550

He remembered to the end of his life what he felt at that moment, while the bone of his lower jaw met the bones of his knuckles pressed so hard against them. He felt absolutely alone -- alone in an emptiness that was different from empyt space. He did not pity himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself and waited -- waited till whatever  it was that enclosed him made some sign.

Wolf Solent - pg. 531

He rose to his feet, too, and they stood awkwardly there,side by side in that windless darkness. Wolf had the feeling for one second as if the world had completely passed them by ... gone on its way and forgotten them ... so that not a soul knew they existed except themselves. As the shadow of a solitary bird on lonely sands answers the form of the bird's flying, so did he feel at that moment that his spirit answered her spirit.

 

Wolf Solent - pg. 531

"I know they're absurd ... these phrases ..."" he went on. "Words like 'pluralism' and 'dualism' and 'monism.' But what they make me think of is just a particular class of vague, delicious, physical sensations! And it's the idea of there having been feelings like these, in far-off, lonng-buried human nerves, that pleases us both so much. It makes life seem so thick and rich and complicated, if you know what I mean?" 

Wolf Solent - pg. 525

She spoke with a wavering happiness that seemed to be lifting the syllables of her voice up and down on the darkness as the undulations of a full-brimmed tide might lift a drifting boat.

Wolf Solent - pg. 523

This comparison cheered Wolf's mind a good deal; and his fingers tightened once more upon the handle of his stick. "These trees, this old-man's-beard, these dark ditch plans... they all see what they've the nature to see ... No living thing has ever seen reality as it is in itself. By God! there's probably nothing to see, when you come to that!"

Wolf Solent - pg. 522

"It's because he knows by some childish instinct just where my life-illusion is weakest. It's because he sees this weak spot,like a raw scratch in the hide of a bear tied to a pole, and it  somehow gets on his nerves, so he wants to poke at it."

Wolf Solent - pg. 512

That chestnut-coloured polished bowl was still within his vision on the smooth turf; but at this moment, in place of giving him a sense of random helplessness, it gave him a sense of reassured control.  In  this pleasant retreat, with the fumes of the Dorchester ale mounting into his head, he began to feel his hand firm and unbewildered once more upon his life's rudder.

Wolf Solent - pg. 491

The actual work he was engaged on lent itself to the breathless peacefulness of that grey afternoon. He had to take the gnomic commentaries and floating fragments of wicked gossip gathered together by his employer, and translate them into a style that had at least some beauty of its own. This style had been his own contribution to the book; and thought it had been evoked under external pressure, and in a sense had been a tour de force, it was in its essence the expression of Wolf's own soul -- the only purely aesthetic expression that Destiny had ever permitted to his deeper nature.

Wolf Solent - pg. 455

"There must be," he thought, "some deep race-memory in which these things are stored up, to be drawn upon by those who seek for them through the world -- a memory that has the power of obliterating infinite debris, while it retains all these frail essences, these emanations from plants and trees, roadsides and gardens as if such things actually possessed immortal souls!" He turned from the gate and pursued his road, swinging his stick from side to side like a madman,  and repeating aloud, as he strode  along, the words "immortal souls."

Wolf Solent - pg. 453

Roads and lanes! Lanes and roads! What a part these tracks for the feet of men and beasts, dusty in Summer, muddy in Winter, had played in his mental consciousness! The thrill that this idea of roadways gave him was a proof to him that his mind was returning to its independent orbit, after its plunge into that maternal hypnosis. His spirit felt indeed deliciously free just then, and expanded its wings to its heart's content, like a great flapping rook. Every object of the way took on an especial glamour; and never had he enoyed so deeply one peculiar trick of his mind. This was a certain queer, sensuous sympathy he could fell sometimes for completely unknown people's lives, as he passed by their dwellings. He enjoyed it now with especial satisfaction, thinking of the people in each cottage he came to, and gathering their experiences together as one might gather a bunch of ragwort  or hemp-agrimony out of the dusty hedges. 

Wolf Solent - pg. 431

Airy and light as it now was, his soul seemed to have been liberated in some secret way from all that clogged and burdened it. The slave-galleon of his manias rocked and tossed on a smooth tide; but his soul, like a careless  albatross, rode on the masthead. There was a strange humming and singing from the galleon itself, as if the immense peace of that summer night had turned it into a trireme of deliverance, carrying liberated pilgrims to the harbour where they would be. Something unutterable, some clue, some signal, had touched the dark bulkheads of this night-voyager; so that hereafter all might be different. What was this clue? All he knew about it now was that it meant the acceptance of something monstrously comic in his inmost being, something comic and stupid, together with something as grotesquely non-human as the sensations of an ichthysaurus! But once having accepted all this, everything was magically well. "Christie! Christie!" he cried in his heart, longing to tell her about it.

Wolf Solent - pg. 425

He left the Lovelace after drinking a pint of Dorchester ale. The night was cool and fragrant. The sky was covered now by a grey film of feathery clouds, through which neither moon nor stars were visible except as a faint diffused luminosity, which lifted the weight of darkness from the earth, but turned the world into a place of phantoms and shadows.

Wolf Solent - pg. 408

... and during the lingered-out and shameless caresses which he enjoyed before he would let her approach the stove, Wolf was compelled to come to the conclusion that erotic delight has in itself the power of becoming a kind of absolute. He felt as if it became a sort of ultimate essence into which the merely relative emotions of the two preoccupied ones sank -- indeed were so utterly lost that a new identity dominated the field of their united consciousness, the admirable identity of amorousness in itself, the  actual spiritual form, or "psychic being," of the god Eros!

Wolf Solent - 394

But never again can God look down

As He did of old upon country and town!

In His huge heart, hidden all Space beyond,

There bides the curse of Lenty Pond;

The curse of the Slow-Worm, by Lenty willow,

Who pitied the elf on her tear-wet pillow,

Her pillow woven of pond-weeds green

Where the willow's twigs made a leafy screen;

And the purple loosestrife and watercress

Whisper above her sorrowfulness.

2666 - pg. 720

They talk. Often, their conversation is unintelligible. The subjects they address are varied: foreign languages, national monuments, the last days of Karl Marx, worker solidarity, the time of the change measured in Earth years and stellar years, the discovery of America as a stage setting, an unfathomable void -- as painted by Dore -- of masks. Then the boy follows the extraterrestrial away from the road and they walk through a wheat field, cross a stream, climb a hill, cross another field, until they reach a smoldering pasture. 

Wolf Solent - pg. 387

The extraordinary thing was that all that poetry  of his first encounter with Gerda seemed like something that had happened to some external portion of his nature, whereas this strange new understanding with Christie sank so deep into his being that it invaded regions of which he himself had hardly been aware.

Wolf Solent - pg. 333

Happiness, such as he had rarely rexperienced, flooded his being; and the fantastic idea came into his head that if he were to die now he would in some subtle way cheat death. 

"I must remember this moment," he said to himself. "Whatever happens to me henceforth, I must remember this moment, and be grateful to the gods!"

Wolf Solent - pg. 261

"I'll live in my own world to the end," he said to himself. "Nothing shall make me yield."

Wolf Solent - pg. 217

The face upon Waterloo steps gave you your happiness. It was the only gift it could give. Between your happiness and that face there was an umbilical cord. All suffering was a martyr's suffering,  all happiness was a martyr's happiness, when once you got a glimpse of that cord! It was the existence in the world of those two gross vulgar parodies of life,  ennui and pleasure, that confused the issues, that blighted the distinctions.

Wolf Solent - pg. 214

There were filmy clouds floating there that seemed to be drifting like the scattered feathers of enormous albatrosses in a pearl-white sea; annd behind these feathery travellers was the milky ocean on which they floated. But even that was not all; for the very ocean seemed broken here annd there into hollow spaces, ethereal gulfs in the fleecy whiteness; and through these gulfs was visible a pale yellowish mist, as if the universal air were reflecting millions of primrose-buds! Nor was even this vaporous luminosity the final revelation of those veiled heavens. Like the entrance to some great highway of the ether, whose air-spun pavement was not the colour of dust, but the colour of torquoise, there, at one single point above the  horizon, the vast blue sky showed through. Transcending both the filmy whiteness and the vaporous  yellowness, hovering there above the marshes of Sedgemoor, this celestial Toll-Pike of the Infinite seemed to Wolf, as he walked towards it, like some entrance into an unknown dimension, into which it was not impossible to pass! Though in reality it was the background of all the clouds that surrounded it, it seemed in some mysterious way nearer than they were. It seemed like a harbour into which the very waters of the Lunt might flow. That incredible patch of blue seemed something into which he could plunge his hands and draw them forth again, filled like overflowing cups with the very ichor of happiness. Ah! that was  the word. It was pure happiness, that blue patch!