Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.
The unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.
The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.
If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.
Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?
The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.
Europe is, perhaps, the least worn-out of the continents, because it is the most lived in. A place that is lived in lives.
I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.
Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object.
Another head - and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time - to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too.
You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the "ordinary world.
I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.
Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.
If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?
In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.
And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.
If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.
The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.
And every true artist is the salvation of every other. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in.
I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. ...wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.
I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.
One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.
I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
You're always begging things to love you," he said, "as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--
The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.
When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made.... There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say surgaries, or I'm done.
The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.
I believe that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting to the falsehood of these personaltimes.
The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.
I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame.