America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you - no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
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America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.
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And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.
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Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
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Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
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But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
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But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
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Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
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Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
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Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
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Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.
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God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
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I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.
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I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
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I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.
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I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
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I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.
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I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
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I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
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I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
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I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.
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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.
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I shall always be a priest of love.
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Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
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Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
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Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
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My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
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Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
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Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
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Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere.
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One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
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Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
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Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes.
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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.
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Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
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That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.
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The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
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The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
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The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.
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The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
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The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
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The human soul needs actual beauty more that bread.
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The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
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The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
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The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.
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The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.
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The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
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The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.
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then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
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This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
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Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
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We are almost always guilty of the hate we encounter.
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We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
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We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America - as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
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Whom men fear they hate, and whom they hate, they wish dead.
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You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
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