Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.
Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.
The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.
Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket
It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.
I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.
He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.
Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.
I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.
I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong?
Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.
I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.
The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.
The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.
The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds
Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.
Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.
The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours."
There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.
No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.
after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.
These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.