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A Man And A Woman Are New To One Another Throughout A Life-time, In The Rhythm Of Marriage That Matches The Rhythm Of The Year. Sex Is The Balance Of Male And Female In The Universe, The Attraction, The Repulsion, The Transit Of Neutrality, The New Attraction, The Repulsion, Always Different, Always New.

-D. H. Lawrence

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A Man And A

D. H. Lawrence

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A Man And A Woman Are New To One Another Throughout A Life-time, In The Rhythm Of Marriage That Matches The Rhythm Of The Year. Sex Is The Balance Of Male And Female In The Universe, The Attraction, The Repulsion, The Transit Of Neutrality, The New Attraction, The Repulsion, Always Different, Always New.

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The Whole Question Of Pornography Seems To Me A Question Of Secrecy. Without Secrecy There Would Be No Pornography. But Secrecy And Modesty Are Two Utterly Different Things. Secrecy Has Always An Element Of Fear In It, Amounting Very Often To Hate. Modesty Is Gentle And Reserved. Today, Modesty Is Thrown To The Winds, Even In The Presence Of The Grey Guardians. But Secrecy Is Hugged, Being A Vice In Itself. And The Attitude Of The Grey Ones Is: Dear Young Ladies, You May Abandon All Modesty, So Long As You Hug Your Dirty Little Secret.

I Love You, Rotten, Delicious Rottenness. ...wonderful Are The Hellish Experiences, Orphic, Delicate Dionysos Of The Underworld.

That Is Almost The Whole Of Russian Literature: The Phenomenal Coruscations Of The Souls Of Quite Commonplace People.

America Exhausts The Springs Of One's Soul - I Suppose That's What It Exists For. It Lives To See All Real Spontaneity Expire. But Anyhow It Doesn't Grind On An Old Nerve As Europe Seems To.

Love Is Never A Fulfillment. Life Is Never A Thing Of Continuous Bliss. There Is No Paradise. Fight And Laugh And Feel Bitter And Feel Bliss: And Fight Again. Fight, Fight. That Is Life.

What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You.

But Then Peace, Peace! I Am So Mistrustful Of It: So Much Afraid That It Means A Sort Of Weakness And Giving In.

One Might Talk About The Sanity Of The Atom The Sanity Of Space The Sanity Of The Electron The Sanity Of Water- For It Is All Alive And Has Something Comparable To That Which We Call Sanity In Ourselves. The Only Oneness Is The Oneness Of Sanity.

For To Desire Is Better Than To Possess, The Finality Of The End Was Dreaded As Deeply As It Was Desired.

The East Is Marvellously Interesting For Tracing Our Steps Back. But For Going Forward, It Is Nothing. All It Can Hope For Is To Be Fertilised By Europe, So That It Can Start On A New Phase.

California Is A Queer Place In A Way, It Has Turned Its Back On The World, And Looks Into The Void Pacific. It Is Absolutely Selfish, Very Empty, But Not False, And At Least, Not Full Of False Effort.

[during The Renaissance] The Italians Said, "we Are One In The Father: We Will Go Back." The Northern Races Said, "we Are One In Christ, We Will Go On.

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.

Reach Me A Gentian, Give Me A Torch! Let Me Guide Myself With The Blue, Forked Torch Of This Flower

If It Doesn't Absorb You, If It Isn't Any Fun, Don't Do It.

While We Live, Let Us Live.

For My Part, I Prefer My Heart To Be Broken. It Is So Lovely, Dawn-kaleidoscopic Within The Crack.

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.

We Have Lost The Art Of Living, And In The Most Important Science Of All, The Science Of Daily Life, The Science Of Behavior, We Are Complete Ignoramuses. We Have Psychology Instead.

Whatever A Human Being Makes And Makes Live, It Lives Because Of The Life He Puts Into It.

I Want Relations Which Are Not Purely Personal, Based On Purely Personal Qualities; But Relations Based Upon Some Unanimous Accord In Truth Or Belief, And A Harmony Of Purpose, Rather Than Of Personality. I Am Weary Of Personality. Let Us Be Easy And Impersonal, Not Forever Fingering Over Our Own Souls, And The Souls Of Our Acquaintances, But Trying To Create A New Life, A New Common Life, A New Complete Tree Of Life From The Roots That Are Within Us.

While The White Man Keeps The Impetus Of His Own Proud, Onward March, The Dark Races Will Yield And Serve, Perforce. But Let The White Man Once Have A Misgiving About His Own Leadership, And The Dark Races Will At Once Attack Him, To Pull Him Down Into The Old Gulfs.

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.

The Only History Is A Mere Question Of One's Struggle Inside Oneself. But That Is The Joy Of It. One Need Neither Discover Americas Nor Conquer Nations, And Yet One Has As Great A Work As Columbus Or Alexander, To Do.

But, Especially In Love, Only Counterfeit Emotions Exist Nowadays. We Have All Been Taught To Mistrust Everybody Emotionally, From Parents Downwards, Or Upwards. Don’t Trust Anybody With Your Real Emotions: If You’ve Got Any: That Is The Slogan Of Today. Trust Them With Your Money, Even, But Never With Your Feelings. They Are Bound To Trample On Them.

Sentimentalism Is The Working Off On Yourself Of Feelings You Haven't Really Got.

Imitate The Magnificent Trees That Speak No Word Of Their Rapture, But Only Breathe Largely The Luminous Breeze.

Do Come Back And Draw The Ferrets, They Are The Most Lovely Noble Darlings In The World.

Tragedy Ought Really To Be A Great Kick At Misery.

The Modern Pantheist Not Only Sees The God In Everything, He Takes Photographs Of It.

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.

They Lived Freely Among The Students, They Argued With The Men Over Philosophical, Sociological And Artistic Matters, They Were Just As Good As The Men Themselves: Only Better, Since They Were Women.

Don't You Find It A Beautiful Clean Thought, A World Empty Of People, Just Uninterrupted Grass, And A Hare Sitting Up?

And Whoever Forces Himself To Love Anybody Begets A Murderer In His Own Body.

Life Is Beautiful, As Long As It Consumes You. When It Is Rushing Through You, Destroying You, Life Is Gorgeous, Glorious. It's When You Burn A Slow Fire And Save Fuel, That Life's Not Worth Having.

I Never Knew How Soothing Trees Are-many Trees And Patches Of Open Sunlight, And Tree Presences; It Is Almost Like Having Another Being.

The Word Arse Is As Much God As The Word Face. It Must Be So, Otherwise You Cut Off Your God At The Waist.

It Always Seemed To Me That Men Wore Their Beards, Like They Wear Their Neckties, For Show.

I'm Not Sure If A Mental Relation With A Woman Doesn't Make It Impossible To Love Her. To Know The Mind Of A Woman Is To End In Hating Her. Love Means The Pre-cognitive Flow...it Is The Honest State Before The Apple.

Isn't It God's Own Image? Tramping His Thirty Miles A Day After Partridges, Or A Little Rubber Ball? Wouldn't You Like To Be Like That, Well Off, And Quite The Thing?

Be Still When You Have Nothing To Say; When Genuine Passion Moves You, Say What You've Got To Say, And Say It Hot.

Let Man Only Approach His Own Self With A Deep Respect, Even Reverence For All That The Creative Soul, The God-mystery Within Us, Puts Forth. Then We Shall All Be Sound And Free. Lewdness Is Hateful Because It Impairs Our Integrity And Our Proud Being. The Creative, Spontaneous Soul Sends Forth Its Promptings Of Desire And Aspiration In Us. These Promptings Are Our True Fate, Which Is Our Business To Fulfill. A Fate Dictated From Outside, From Theory Or From Circumstance, Is A False Fate.

So Slowly The Hot Elephant Hearts Grow Full Of Desire, And The Great Beasts Mate In Secret At Last, Hiding Their Fire.

It Seems To Me A Purely Lyric Poet Gives Himself, Right Down To His Sex, To His Mood, Utterly And Abandonedly, Whirls Himself Roundtill He Spontaneously Combusts Into Verse. He Has Nothing That Goes On, No Passion, Only A Few Intense Moods, Separate Like Odd Stars, And When Each Has Burned Away, He Must Die.

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.

It Is A Curious Thing How Poets Tend To Become Ascetics.... Even A Debauch For Them Is A Self-flagellation. They Go On The Loose In Cruelty Against Themselves, Admitting That They Are Pandering To, And Despising, The Lower Self.

It Seems To Me That The Chief Thing About A Woman - Who Is Much Of A Woman - Is That In The Long Run She Is Not To Be Had... She Is Not To Be Caught By Any Of The Catch-words, Love, Beauty, Honor, Duty, Worth, Work, Salvation - None Of Them - Not In The Long Run. In The Long Run She Only Says Am I Satisfied, Or Is There Some Beastly Dissatisfaction Gnawing And Gnawing Inside Me. And If There Is Some Dissatisfaction, It Is Physical, At Least As Much As Psychic, Sex As Much As Soul.

Sex Is Just Another Form Of Talk, Where You Act The Words Instead Of Saying Them.

Oh, What A Catastrophe, What A Maiming Of Love When It Was Made Personal, Merely Personal Feeling. This Is What Is The Matter With Us: We Are Bleeding At The Roots Because We Are Cut Off From The Earth And Sun And Stars. Love Has Become A Grinning Mockery Because, Poor Blossom, We Plucked It From Its Stem On The Tree Of Life And Expected It To Keep On Blooming In Our Civilized Vase On The Table.

Sing Then The Core Of Dark And Absolute Oblivion Where The Soul At Last Is Lost In Utter Peace.

He Knew That Conscience Was Chiefly Fear Of Society Or Fear Of Oneself.

Let There Be An End ... Of All This Welter Of Pity, Which Is Only Self-pity Reflected Onto Some Obvious Surface.

Never Trust The Teller, Trust The Tale.

We Don't Exist Unless We Are Deeply And Sensually In Touch With That Which Can Be Touched But Not Known.

Death Is The Only Pure, Beautiful Conclusion Of A Great Passion.

[u]nless A Woman Is Held, By Man, Safe Within The Bounds Of Belief, She Becomes Inevitably A Destructive Force.

Instead Of Chopping Yourself Down To Fit The World, Chop The World Down To Fit Yourself.

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.

Recklessness Is Almost A Man's Revenge On His Woman. He Feels He Is Not Valued So He Will Risk Destroying Himself To Deprive Her Altogether.

Comes Over One An Absolute Necessity To Move. And What Is More, To Move In Some Particular Direction. A Double Necessity Then: To Get On The Move, And To Know Whither.

Shall I Tell You What You Have That Other Men Don't?.... It's The Courage Of Your Own Tenderness.

The Feelings I Don't Have I Don't Have. The Feelings I Don't Have, I Won't Say I Have. The Felings You Say You Have, You Don't Have. The Feelings You Would Like Us Both To Have, We Neither Of Us Have.

The Mind Has No Existence By Itself; It Is Only The Glitter Of The Sun On The Surface Of The Waters.

Life Is A Travelling To The Edge Of Knowledge, Then A Leap Taken.

Whatever Men You Take, Keep The Idea Of Man Intact: Let Your Soul Wait Whether Your Body Does Or Not.

Plant Consciousness, Insect Consciousness, Fish Consciousness, All Are Related By One Permanent Element, Which We May Call The Religious Element Inherent In All Life, Even In A Flea: The Sense Of Wonder. That Is Our Sixth Sense, And It Is The Natural Religious Sense.

One Realm We Have Never Conquered: The Pure Present.

It Is All A Question Of Sensitiveness. Brute Force And Overbearing May Make A Terrific Effect. But In The End, That Which Lives By Delicate Sensitiveness. If It Were A Question Of Brute Force, Not A Single Human Baby Would Survive For A Fortnight. It Is The Grass Of The Field, Most Frail Of All Things, That Supports All Life All The Time. But For The Green Grass, No Empire Would Rise, No Man Would Eat Bread: For Grain Is Grass; And Hercules Or Napoleon Or Henry Ford Would Alike Be Denied Existence.

In America The Cohesion Was A Matter Of Choice And Will. But In Europe It Was Organic.

For Man, As For Flower And Beast And Bird, The Supreme Triumph Is To Be Most Vividly, Most Perfectly Alive.

Men Fight For Liberty And Win It With Hard Knocks. Their Children, Brought Up Easy, Let It Slip Away Again, Poor Fools. And Their Grandchildren Are Once More Slaves.

The Christian Fear Of The Pagan Outlook Has Damaged The Whole Consciousness Of Man.

Homer Was Wrong In Saying, "would That Strife Might Pass Away From Among Gods And Men!" He Did Not See That He Was Praying For The Destruction Of The Universe.

And That Is How We Are. By Strength Of Will We Cut Off Our Inner Intuitive Knowledge From Admitted Consciousness. This Causes A State Of Dread, Or Apprehension, Which Makes The Blow Ten Times Worse When It Does Fall.

The Spirit Of Place [does Not] Exert Its Full Influence Upon A Newcomer Until The Old Inhabitant Is Dead Or Absorbed. So America.... The Moment The Last Nuclei Of Red [indian] Life Break Up In America, Then The White Men Will Have To Reckon With The Full Force Of The Demon Of The Continent.

Ours Is An Excessively Conscious Age. We Know So Much, We Feel So Little.

Never Was An Age More Sentimental, More Devoid Of Real Feeling, More Exaggerated In False Feeling, Than Our Own.

There Is An Eternal Vital Correspondence Between Our Blood And The Sun: There Is An Eternal Vital Correspondence Between Our Nerves And The Moon. If We Get Out Of Contact And Harmony With The Sun And Moon, Then Both Turn Into Great Dragons Of Destruction Against Us.

If A Woman's Got Nothing But Her Fair Fame To Feed On, Why, It's Thin Tack, And A Donkey Would Die Of It!

Only The Desert Has A Fascination--to Ride Alone--in The Sun In The Forever Unpossessed Country--away From Man. That Is A Great Temptation.

When Love Enters, The Whole Spiritual Constitution Of A Man Changes, Is Filled With The Holy Ghost, And Almost His Form Is Altered.

You Have To Have Something Vicious In You To Be A Creative Writersomething Old-adamish, Incompatible To The "ordinary World.

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Especially The Male Of The Species

I Like Relativity And Quantum Theories Because I Don't Understand Them And They Make Me Feel As If Space Shifted About Like A Swan That Can't Settle, Refusing To Sit Still And Be Measured; And As If The Atom Were An Impulsive Thing Always Changing Its Mind.

Oh The Innocent Girl In Her Maiden Teens Knows Perfectly Well What Everything Means.

If I Were The Moon, I Know Where I Would Fall Down.

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.

My Whole Working Philosophy Is That The Only Stable Happiness For Mankind Is That It Shall Live Married In Blessed Union To Woman-kind - Intimacy, Physical And Psychical Between A Man And His Wife. I Wish To Add That My State Of Bliss Is By No Means Perfect.

That's How Women Are With Me " Said Paul. "they Want Me Like Mad But They Don't Want To Belong To Me.

One Never Can Know The Whys And The Wherefores Of One's Passional Changes.

The True Unconscious Is The Well-head, The Fountain Of Real Motivity. The Sex Of Which Adam And Eve Became Conscious Derived Fromthe Very God Who Bade Them Be Not Conscious Of It.

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 Orange And Scrub The Floor.

Gods Should Be Iridescent, Like The Rainbow In The Storm. Man Creates A God In His Own Image, And The Gods Grow Old Along With The Men That Made Them... But The God-stuff Roars Eternally, Like The Sea, With Too Vast A Sound To Be Heard.

For Whereas The Mind Works In Possibilities, The Intuitions Work In Actualities, And What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You. Whereas What You Mentally Or "consciously" Desire Is Nine Times Out Of Ten Impossible; Hitch Your Wagon To A Star, Or You Will Just Stay Where You Are.

Far Back, Far Back In Our Dark Soul The Horse Prances.

An Artist Is Only An Ordinary Man With A Greater Potentiality--same Stuff, Same Make Up, Only More Force. And The Strong Driving Force Usually Finds His Weak Spot, And He Goes Cranked, Or Goes Under.

One Could Laugh At The World Better If It Didn't Mix Tender Kindliness With Its Brutality.

The Whole Life-effort Of Man Is To Get His Life Into Direct Contact With The Elemental Life Of The Cosmos, Mountain Life, Cloud Life, Thunder Life, Air Life, Earth Life, Sun Life. To Come Into Immediate Felt Contact, And So Derive Energy, Power And A Dark Sort Of Joy. This Effort Into Sheer Naked Contact, Without An Intermediary Or Mediator Is The Root Meaning Of Religion.

Man Is A Thought-adventurer.

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.

The Glamour Of Childish Days Is Upon Me, My Manhood Is Cast Down In The Flood Of Remembrance.

Most Fatal, Most Hateful Of All Things Is Bullying.... Sensual Bullying Of Course Is Fairly Easily Detected. What Is More Dangerous Is Ideal Bullying. Bullying People Into What Is Ideally Good For Them.

If We Lose Our Sanity ... We Can But Howl The Lugubrious Howl Of Idiots, The Howl Of The Utterly Lost Howling Their Nowhereness.

When I Read Shakespeare I Am Struck With Wonder That Such Trivial People Should Muse And Thunder In Such Lovely Language.

I Like To Write When I Feel Spiteful; It's Like Having A Good Sneeze.

How I Hate The Attitude Of Ordinary People To Life. How I Loathe Ordinariness! How From My Soul I Abhor Nice Simple People, With Their Eternal Price List. It Makes My Blood Boil.

I Can Give You A Spirit Love, I Have Given You This Long, Long Time; But Not Embodied Passion. See, You Are A Nun. I Have Given You What I Would Give A Holy Nun...in All Our Relations No Body Enters. I Do Not Talk To You Through The Senses - Rather Through The Spirit. That Is Why We Cannot Love In The Common Sense.

Behold Then Septimus Dodge Returning To Dodge-town Victorious. Not Crowned With Laurel, It Is True, But Wreathed In Lists Of Things He Has Seen And Sucked Dry. Seen And Sucked Dry, You Know: Venus De Milo, The Rhine Or The Coliseum: Swallowed Like So Many Clams, And Left The Shells.

The Great Crime Which The Moneyed Classes And Promoters Of Industry Committed In The Palmy Victorian Days Was The Condemning Of The Workers To Ugliness, Ugliness, Ugliness: Meanness And Formless And Ugly Surroundings, Ugly Ideals, Ugly Religion, Ugly Hope, Ugly Love, Ugly Clothes, Ugly Furniture, Ugly Houses, Ugly Relationship Between Workers And Employers. The Human Soul Needs Actual Beauty More Than Bread.

God Doesn't Know Things. He Is Things.

Your Most Vital Necessity In This Life Is That You Shall Love Your Wife Completely And Implicitly And In An Entire Nakedness Of Body And Spirit.... This That I Tell You Is My Message As Far As I've Got Any.

Where Is The Source Of All Money-sickness, And The Origin Of All Sex-perversion?.... It Lies In The Heart Of Man, And Not In The Conditions.

The Flood Subsides, And The Body, Like A Worn Sea-shell Emerges Strange And Lovely.

Money Is The Seal And Stamp Of Success.

That's It! When You Come To Know Men, That's How They Are: Too Sensitive In The Wrong Place.

Sight Is The Least Sensual Of All The Senses. And We Strain Ourselves To See, See, See--everything, Everything Through The Eye, Inone Mode Of Objective Curiosity.

Beauty Is An Experience, Nothing Else. It Is Not A Fixed Pattern Or An Arrangement Of Features. It Is Something Felt, A Glow Or A Communicated Sense Of Fineness.

He Always Ran Away From The Battle With Himself. Even In His Own Heart's Privacy, He Excused Himself, Saying, "if She Hadn't Said So-and-so, It Would Never Have Happened.

Europe Is, Perhaps, The Least Worn-out Of The Continents, Because It Is The Most Lived In. A Place That Is Lived In Lives.

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.

And Then She Realized That His Presence Was The Wall, His Presence Was Destroying Her. Unless She Could Break Out, She Must Die Most Fearfully, Walled Up In Horror. And He Was The Wall. She Must Break Down The Wall. She Must Break Him Down Before Her, The Awful Obstruction Of Him Who Obstructed Her Life To The Last. It Must Be Done, Or She Must Perish Most Horribly.

When Van Gogh Paints Sunflowers, He Reveals, Or Achieves, The Vivid Relation Between Himself, As Man, And The Sunflower, As Sunflower, At That Quick Moment Of Time. His Painting Does Not Represent The Sunflower Itself. We Shall Never Know What The Sunflower Itself Is. And The Camera Will Visualize The Sunflower Far More Perfectly Than Van Gogh Can.

Not That The Red Indian Will Ever Possess The Broad Lands Of America. At Least I Presume Not. But His Ghost Will.

Native American

The Sense Of Wonder, That Is Our Sixth Sense.

Sense Of Wonder

Melville Had To Fight, Fight Against The Existing World, Against His Own Very Self. Only He Would Never Quite Put The Knife In The Heart Of His Paradisal Ideal. Somehow, Somewhere, Somewhen, Love Should Be A Fulfillment, And Life Should Be A Thing Of Bliss. That Was His Fixed Ideal. Fata Morgana. That Was The Pin He Tortured Himself On, Like A Pinned-down Butterfly.

A Man Must Keep His Earnestness Nimble, To Escape Ridicule.

Sex And A Cocktail: They Both Lasted About As Long, Had The Same Effect, And Amounted To About The Same Thing.

Men Always Do Leave Off Really Thinking, When The Last Bit Of Wild Animal Dies In Them.

Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out, Especially If You're Married And Her Name's Bertha

Ethics And Equity And The Principles Of Justice Do Not Change With The Calendar.

Ethical Principles

Morality Which Is Based On Ideas, Or On An Ideal, Is An Unmitigated Evil.

In America The Chief Accusation Seems To Be One Of "eroticism." This Is Odd, Rather Puzzling To My Mind. Which Eros? Eros Of The Jaunty "amours," Or Eros Of The Sacred Mysteries? And If The Latter, Why Accuse, Why Not Respect, Even Venerate?

Sacred Love Is Selfless, Seeking Not Its Own. The Lover Serves His Beloved And Seeks Perfect Communion Of Oneness With Her.

Mystic Equality Lies In Abstraction, Not In Having Or In Doing, Which Are Processes. In Function And Process, One Man, One Part, Must Of Necessity Be Subordinate To Another. It Is A Condition Of Being.

The Novel Is A Perfect Medium For Revealing To Us The Changing Rainbow Of Our Living Relationships. The Novel Can Help Us To Live,as Nothing Else Can: No Didactic Scripture, Anyhow. If The Novelist Keeps His Thumb Out Of The Pan.

In The End, For Congenial Sympathy, For Poetry, For Work, For Original Feeling And Expression, For Perfect Companionship With One's Friends--give Me The Country.

The Only Justice Is To Follow The Sincere Intuition Of The Soul, Angry Or Gentle. Anger Is Just, And Pity Is Just, But Judgement Is Never Just.

I Can't Bear Art That You Can Walk Round And Admire. A Book Should Be Either A Bandit Or A Rebel Or A Man In The Crowd.

The Final Aim Is Not To Know, But To Be.... You've Got To Know Yourself So That You Can At Last Be Yourself. "be Yourself" Is The Last Motto.

Sex Is Our Deepest Form Of Consciousness. It Is Utterly Non-ideal, Non-mental. It Is Pure Blood-consciousness.... It Is The Consciousness Of The Night, When The Soul Is Almost Asleep.

Men Are Freest When They Are Most Unconscious Of Freedom. The Shout Is A Rattling Of Chains, Always Was.

Chains That Bind

You Live By What You Thrill To, And There's The End Of It.

And Venus Among The Fishes Skips And Is A She-dolphin She Is The Gay, Delighted Porpoise Sporting With Love And The Sea She Is The Female Tunny-fish, Round And Happy Among The Males And Dense With Happy Blood, Dark Rainbow Bliss In 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.

That Is The Real Pivot Of All Bourgeois Consciousness In All Countries: Fear And Hate Of The Instinctive, Intuitional, Procreativebody In Man Or Woman. But Of Course This Fear And Hate Had To Take On A Righteous Appearance, So It Became Moral, Said That The Instincts, Intuitions And All The Activities Of The Procreative Body Were Evil, And Promised A Reward For Their Suppression. That Is The Great Clue To Bourgeois Psychology: The Reward Business.

The Map Appears To Us More Real Than The Land.

The True Self Is Not Aware That It Is A Self. A Bird, As It Sings, Sings Itself. But Not According To A Picture. It Has No Idea Of Itself.

Literature Is A Toil And A Snare, A Curse That Bites Deep.

It Seems To Me Absolutely True, That Our World, Which Appears To Us The Surface Of All Things, Is Really The Bottom Of A Deep Ocean: All Our Trees Are Submarine Growths, And We Are Weird, Scaly-clad Submarine Fauna, Feeding Ourselves On Offal Like Shrimps. Only Occasionally The Soul Rises Gasping Through The Fathomless Fathoms Under Which We Live, Far Up To The Surface Of The Ether, Where There Is True Air.

Was His Life Nothing? Had He Nothing To Show, No Work? He Did Not Count His Work, Anyone Could Have Done It. What Had He Known, But The Long, Marital Embrace With His Wife. Curious, That This Was What His Life Amounted To! At Any Rate, It Was Something, It Was Eternal. He Would Say So To Anybody, And Be Proud Of It. He Lay With His Wife In His Arms, And She Was Still His Fulfillment, Just The Same As Ever. And That Was The Be-all And The End-all. Yes, And He Was Proud Of It.

One Man Isn't Any Better Than Another, Not Because They Are Equal, But Because They Are Intrinsically Other, That There Is No Termof Comparison.

An Illusion Which Is A Real Experience Is Worth Having.

The Difference Between People Isn't In Their Class, But In Themselves. Only From The Middle Classes One Gets Ideas, And From The Common People--life Itself, Warmth. You Feel Their Hates And Loves.

The Business Of Art Is To Reveal The Relation Between Man And His Environment.

Anyone Who Is Kind To Man Knows The Fragmentariness Of Most Men, And Wants To Arrange A Society Of Power In Which Men Fall Naturally Into A Collective Wholeness, Since They Cannot Have An Individual Wholeness. In This Collective Wholeness They Will Be Fulfilled. But If They Make Efforts At Individual Fulfilment, They Must Fail For They Are By Nature Fragmentary.

Marriage And Deathless Friendship, Both Should Be Inviolable And Sacred: Two Great Creative Passions, Separate, Apart, But Complementary: The One Pivotal, The Other Adventurous: The One, Marriage, The Centre Of Human Life; And The Other, The Leap Ahead.

What Is Pornography To One Man Is The Laughter Of Genius To Another.

If Only I Am Keen And Hard Like The Sheer Tip Of A Wedge Driven By Invisible Blows, The Rock Will Split, We Shall Come At The Wonder, We Shall Find The Hesperides.

The One Woman Who Never Gives Herself Is Your Free Woman, Who Is Always Giving Herself.

Oh Build Your Ship Of Death. Oh Build It! For You Will Need It. For The Voyage Of Oblivion Awaits You.

Only At His Maximum Does An Individual Surpass All His Derivative Elements, And Become Purely Himself. And Most People Never Get There. In His Own Pure Individuality A Man Surpasses His Father And Mother, And Is Utterly Unknown To Them.

Consciousness Is An End In Itself. We Torture Ourselves Getting Somewhere, And When We Get There It Is Nowhere, For There Is Nowhere To Get To.

For Us To Go To Italy And To Penetrate Into Italy Is Like A Most Fascinating Act Of Self-discovery

The Real Trouble About Women Is That They Must Always Go On Trying To Adapt Themselves To Men's Theories Of Women, As They Alwayshave Done. When A Woman Is Thoroughly Herself, She Is Being What Her Type Of Man Wants Her To Be. When A Woman Is Hysterical It's Because She Doesn't Quite Know What To Be, Which Pattern To Follow, Which Man's Picture Of Woman To Live Up To.

The East Is Not For Me--the Sensuous Spiritual Voluptuousness, The Curious Sensitiveness Of The Naked People, Their Black, Bottomless, Hopeless Eyes.

Europe's The Mayonnaise All Right, But America Supplies The Good Old Lobster.

Why, Oh Why Must One Grow Up, Why Must One Inherit This Heavy, Numbing Responsibility Of Living An Undiscovered Life? Out Of The Nothingness And The Undifferentiated Mass, To Make Something Of Herself! But What? In The Obscurity And Pathlessness To Take A Direction! But Whither? How Take Even One Step? And Yet, How Stand Still? This Was Torment Indeed, To Inherit The Responsibility Of One’s Own Life.

You Love Me So Much, You Want To Put Me In Your Pocket. And I Should Die There Smothered.

The Near Touch Of Death May Be A Release Into Life; If Only It Will Break The Egoistic Will, And Release That Other Flow.

Brute Force Crushes Many Plants. Yet The Plants Rise Again. The Pyramids Will Not Last A Moment Compared With The Daisy. And Before Buddha Or Jesus Spoke The Nightingale Sang, And Long After The Words Of Jesus And Buddha Are Gone Into Oblivion The Nightingale Still Will Sing. Because It Is Neither Preaching Nor Commanding Nor Urging. It Is Just Singing. And In The Beginning It Was Not A Word, But A Chirrup.

In The Ancient Recipe, The Three Antidotes For Dullness Or Boredom Are Sleep, Drink, And Travel. It Is Rather Feeble. From Sleep You Wake Up, From Drink You Become Sober, And From Travel You Come Home Again. And Then Where Are You? No, The Two Sovereign Remedies For Dullness Are Love Or A Crusade.

She Looked At Him, And Oh, The Weariness To Her, Of The Effort To Understand Another Language, The Weariness Of Hearing Him, Attending To Him, Making Out Who He Was, As He Stood There Fair-bearded And Alien, Looking At Her. She Knew Something Of Him, Of His Eyes. But She Could Not Grasp Him. She Closed Her Eyes.

This Is The Very Worst Wickedness, That We Refuse To Acknowledge The Passionate Evil That Is In Us. This Makes Us Secret And Rotten.

Every Profound New Movement Makes A Great Swing Also Backwards To Some Older, Half-forgotten Way Of Consciousness.

There Is A Sixth Sense, The Natural Religious Sense, The Sense Of Wonder.

The Great Home Of The Soul Is The Open Road.

My Soul Is My Great Asset And My Great Misfortune.

I Believe That The Highest Virtue Is To Be Happy, Living In The Greatest Truth, Not Submitting To The Falsehood Of These Personaltimes.

We Must Get Back Into Relation, Vivid And Nourishing Relation To The Cosmos And The Universe. The Way Is Through Daily Ritual, Andis An Affair Of The Individual And The Household, A Ritual Of Dawn And Noon And Sunset, The Ritual Of The Kindling Fire And Pouring Water, The Ritual Of The First Breath, And The Last.

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.

I See A Redness Suddenly Come Into The Evening's Anxious Breast-- 'tis The Wound Of Love Goes Home!

Once You Abstract From This, Once You Generalize And Postulate Universals, You Have Departed From The Creative Reality, And Entered The Realm Of Static Fixity, Mechanism, Materialism.

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.

Museums, Museums, Object-lessons Rigged Out To Illustrate The Unsound Theories Of Archaeologists, Crazy Attempts To Co-ordinate And Get Into A Fixed Order That Which Has No Fixed Order And Will Not Be Co-coordinated! It Is Sickening! Why Must All Experience Be Systematized? A Museum Is Not A First-hand Contact: It Is An Illustrated Lecture. And What One Wants Is The Actual Vital Touch.

Why Does The Thin Grey Strand Floating Up From The Forgotten Cigarette Between My Fingers, Why Does It Trouble Me?

To Penetrate Into Italy Is Like A Most Fascinating Act Of Self-discovery-back, Back Down The Old Ways Of Time. Strange And Wonderful Chords Awake In Us, And Vibrate Again After Many Hundreds Of Years Of Complete Forgetfulness.

You Can Have Your Cake And Eat It. But My God, It Will Go Rotten Inside You.

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.

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.

The Mystery Of The Evening-star Brilliant In Silence And Distance Between The Downward-surging Plunge Of The Sun And The Vast, Hollow Seething Of Inpouring Night. The Magnificence Of The Watchful Morning-star, That Watches Between The Night And The Day, The Gleaming Clue To The Two Opposites.

Now The Only Decent Way To Get Something Done Is To Get It Done By Somebody Who Quite Likes Doing It.

Paris Was Sad. One Of The Saddest Towns: Weary Of Its Now-mechanical Sensuality, Weary Of The Tension Of Money, Money, Money, Weary Even Of Resentment And Conceit, Just Weary To Death, And Still Not Sufficiently Americanized Or Londonized To Hide The Weariness Under A Mechanical Jig-jig-jig!

Whales In Mid-ocean, Suspended In The Waves Of The Sea Great Heaven Of Whales In The Waters, Old Hierarchies. And Enormous Mother Whales Lie Dreaming Suckling Their Whale-tender Young And Dreaming With Strange Whale Eyes Wide Open In The Waters Of The Beginning And The End.

And Besides, Look At Elder Flowers And Bluebells-they Are A Sign That Pure Creation Takes Place - Even The Butterfly. But Humanity Never Gets Beyond The Caterpillar Stage -it Rots In The Chrysalis, It Never Will Have Wings.it Is Anti-creation, Like Monkeys And Baboons.

And This Is The Final Meaning Of Work: The Extension Of Human Consciousness. The Lesser Meaning Of Work Is The Achieving Of Self-preservation.

They Were Evidently Small Men, All Wind And Quibbles, Flinging Out Their Chuffy Grain To Us With Far Less Interest Than A Farm-wife Feels As She Scatters Corn To Her Fowls.

Another Head - And A Black Alpaca Jacket And A Serviette This Time - To Tell Us Coffee Is Ready. Not Before It Is Time, Too.

When I Wish I Was Rich, Then I Know I Am Ill.

I Think New Mexico Was The Greatest Experience From The Outside World That I Have Ever Had.

... He Preferred His Own Madness, To The Regular Sanity. He Rejoiced In His Own Madness, He Was Free. He Did Not Want That Old Sanity Of The World, Which Was Become So Repulsive. He Rejoiced In The New-found World Of His Madness. It Was So Fresh And Delicate And So Satisfying.

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Bruce Jay Friedman

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