Your Latest Trick

Ocean Deep

Where I Come From

A window breaks down a long dark street

And a siren wails in the night.

But I'm alright 'cause I have you here with me

And I can almost see through the dark there is light.

If you knew how much this moment means to me

And how long I've waited for your touch.

If you knew how happy you are making me

I never thought that I'd love anyone so much.

... Feels Like Home, Edwina Hayes

Brideshead Revisited

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name: Charles Ryder. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be. On second thought, one emotion remains my own. Alone among the borrowed and the second-hand, as pure as that faith from which I am still in flight: Guilt.

Perhaps […] all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

Just the place to bury a crock of gold. I should like to bury something precious, in every place I've been happy. And then when I was old, and ugly and miserable, I could come back, and dig it up, and remember.

He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds – for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

I asked too much of you. I knew it all along, really. Only God can give you that sort of love.

I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant, Arcadian days.

These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past –, were always with me.

... Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Do I Wake Or Sleep?

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music: -- Do I wake or sleep?

... Ode To A Nightingale, John Keats

I Almost Wish We Were Butterflies

“I almost wish we were butterflies and lived but three summer days;

Three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain”

... Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, John Keats

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

... He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven, WB Yeats

Read by Anthony Hopkins, 84 Charring Cross Road

What Might Have Been

"But that doesn't mean to say, of course, there aren't occasions now and then - extremely desolate occasions - when you think to yourself: 'What a terrible mistake I've made with my life.' And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance, I get to thinking about a life I may have had with you, Mr. Stevens. And I supposed that's when I get angry about some trivial little thing and leave. But each time I do, I realize before long - that my rightful place is with my husband. After all, there's no turning back the clock now. One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been"

... The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro