The old ideals are dead as nails--nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman--sort of ultimate marriage--and there isn't anything else.
I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.
The east is not for me--the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes.
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.
The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.
Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.
the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.
Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.
Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.
Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It's gay and gospel truth to me.
Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon.... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.
We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.
That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.
That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.
I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.--Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.
The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.
One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God.
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