Background Image

...

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.

-D. H. Lawrence

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Creation Destroys As It

D. H. Lawrence

...

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.

Views: 7

Topic

More From D. H. Lawrence

I Think I Am Much Too Valuable A Creature To Offer Myself To A German Bullet Gratis And For Fun.

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.

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 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.

When Each Thing Is Unique In Itself, There Can Be No Comparison Made.... There Is Only This Strange Recognition Of Present Otherness.

People Always Make War When They Say They Love Peace.

She Wished Some Help Would Come From Outside. But In The Whole World There Was No Help. Society Was Terrible Because It Was Insane. Civilized Society Is Insane. Money And So-called Love Are Its Two Great Manias; Money A Long Way First. The Individual Asserts Himself In His Disconnected Insanity In These Two Modes: Money And Love.

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

Now It Is Autumn And The Falling Fruit And The Long Journey Towards Oblivion. The Apples Falling Like Great Drops Of Dew To Bruise Themselves An Exit From Themselves.

There's Lots Of Good Fish In The Sea...maybe...but The Vast Masses Seem To Be Mackerel Or Herring, And If You're Not Mackerel Or Herring Yourself, You Are Likely To Find Very Few Good Fish In The Sea.

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

I Am Only Half There When I Am Ill, And So There Is Only Half A Man To Suffer. To Suffer In One's Whole Self Is So Great A Violation, That It Is Not To Be Endured.

Sanity Means The Wholeness Of The Consciousness. And Our Society Is Only Part Conscious, Like An Idiot.

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 Acrid Scents Of Autumn, Reminiscent Of Slinking Beasts, Make Me Fear

My God, These Folks Don't Know How To Love - That's Why They Love So Easily.

Only Youth Has A Taste Of Immortality.

How The Horse Dominated The Mind Of The Early Races Especially Of The Mediterranean! You Were A Lord If You Had A Horse. Far Back, Far Back In Our Dark Soul The Horse Prances...the Horse, The Horse! The Symbol Of Surging Potency And Power Of Movement, Of Action In Man!

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

The World Is Wonderful And Beautiful And Good Beyond One's Wildest Imagination. Never, Never, Never Could One Conceive What Love Is, Beforehand, Never. Life Can Be Great-quite God-like. It Can Be So. God Be Thanked I Have Proved It.

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.

I Am Part Of The Sun As My Eye Is Part Of Me. That I Am Part Of The Earth My Feet Know Perfectly, And My Blood Is Part Of The Sea. My Soul Knows That I Am Part Of The Human Race, My Soul Is An Organic Part Of The Great Human Race, As My Spirit Is Part Of My Nation. In My Own Very Self, I Am Part Of My Family.

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.

Protestantism Came And Gave A Great Blow To The Religious And Ritualistic Rhythm Of The Year, In Human Life. Non-conformity Almostfinished The Deed.... Mankind Has Got To Get Back To The Rhythm Of The Cosmos, And The Permanence Of Marriage.

You're Spending Your Life Without Renewing It. You've Got To Be Amused, Properly Healthily Amused. You're Spending Your Vitality Without Making Any. Can't Go On You Know. Depression! Avoid Depression!

The Whole Point About The True Unconscious Is That It Is All The Time Moving Forward, Beyond The Range Of Its Own Fixed Laws Or Habits. It Is No Good Trying To Superimpose An Ideal Nature Upon The Unconscious.

And To My Lips' Bright Crimson Rim The Passion Slips, And Down My Slim White Body Drips The Shining Hymn.

Reach Me A Gentian, Give Me A Torch! Let Me Guide Myself With The Blue, Forked Torch Of A Flower Down The Darker And Darker Stairs, Where Blue Is Darkened On Blueness Even Where Persephone Goes, Just Now, From The Frosted September To The Sightless Realm Where Darkness Is Awake Upon The Dark.

Sometimes Snakes Can’t Slough. They Can’t Burst Their Old Skin. Then They Go Sick And Die Inside The Old Skin, And Nobody Ever Sees The New Pattern. It Needs A Real Desperate Recklessness To Burst Your Old Skin At Last. You Simply Don’t Care What Happens To You, If You Rip Yourself In Two, So Long As You Do Get Out.

Any Inhibition Must Be Wrong, Since Inevitably In The End It Causes Neurosis And Insanity.

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.

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.

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.

A Snake Came To My Water Trough On A Hot, Hot Day, And I In Pajamas For The Heat, To Drink There.

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.

The Great Pagan World Of Which Egypt And Greece Were The Last Living Termsonce Had A Vast And Perhaps Perfect Science Of Itsown, A Science In Terms Of Life. In Our Era This Science Crumbled Into Magic And Charlatanry. But Even Wisdom Crumbles.

The Autumn Always Gets Me Badly, As It Breaks Into Colours. I Want To Go South, Where There Is No Autumn, Where The Cold Doesn't Crouch Over One Like A Snow-leopard Waiting To Pounce.

The World Is Wonderful And Beautiful And Good Beyond One's Wildest Imagination.

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.

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.

The Great Virtue In Life Is Real Courage That Knows How To Face Facts And Live Beyond Them.

To Our Senses, The Elements Are Four And Have Ever Been, And Will Ever Be For They Are The Elements Of Life, Of Poetry, And Of Perception, The Four Great Ones, The Four Roots, The First Four Of Fire And The Wet, Earth And The Wide Air Of The World. To Find The Other Many Elements, You Must Go To The Laboratory And Hunt Them Down. But The Four We Have Always With Us, They Are Our World. Or Rather, They Have Us With Them.

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

The Cruelest Thing A Man Can Do To A Woman Is To Portray Her As Perfection.

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.

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

Pure Morality Is Only An Instinctive Adjustment Which The Soul Makes.

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.

A Woman Needn't Be Dragged Down By Her Functions.

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.

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.

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

I Shall Always Be A Priest Of Love.

It's Hard To Ravish A Tin Of Sardines.

Tragedy Ought Really To Be A Great Kick At Misery.

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

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

The Novel Is The Highest Form Of Human Expression So Far Attained. Why? Because It Is So Incapable Of The Absolute.

The Peasants Of Sicily, Who Have Kept Their Own Wheat And Make Their Own Natural Brown Bread, Ah, It Is Amazing How Fresh And Sweet And Clean Their Loaf Seems, So Perfumed, As Home-made Bread Used All To Be Before The War.

The Nearer A Conception Comes Towards Finality, The Nearer Does The Dynamic Relation, Out Of Which This Concept Has Arisen, Draw To A Close. To Know Is To Lose.

Those That Go Searching For Love Only Make Manifest Their Own Lovelessness, And The Loveless Never Find Love, Only The Loving Find Love, And They Never Have To Seek For It.

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.

So Long As You Don't Feel Life's Paltry And A Miserable Business, The Rest Doesn't Matter, Happiness Or Unhappiness.

I Never Saw A Wild Thing Sorry For Itself

Whatever God There Is Is Slowly Eliminating The Guts And Alimentary System From The Human Being, To Evolve A Higher, More Spiritual Being.

The Elephant, The Huge Old Beast, Is Slow To Mate

There Is Only One Thing That A Man Really Wants To Do, All His Life; And That Is, To Find His Way To His God, His Morning Star, Salute His Fellow Man, And Enjoy The Woman Who Has Come The Long Way With Him.

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?

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

All Hopes Of Eternity And All Gain From The Past He Would Have Given To Have Her There, To Be Wrapped Warm With Him In One Blanket, And Sleep, Only Sleep. It Seemed The Sleep With The Woman In His Arms Was The Only Necessity.

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.

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!

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

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

Don't Talk To Me Any More About Poetry For Months -- Unless It Is Other Men's Work. I Really Love Verse, Even Rubbish. But I'm Fearfully Busy At A Novel, And Brush All The Gossamer Of Verse Off My Face.

We Are So Overwhelmed With Quantities Of Books, That We Hardly Realise Any More That A Book Can Be Valuable, Valuable Like A Jewel, Or A Lovely Picture, Into Which You Can Look Deeper And Deeper And Get A More Profound Experience Every Time.

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

The Refined Punishments Of The Spiritual Mode Are Usually Much More Indecent And Dangerous Than A Good Smack.

I Would Rather Sit Still In A State Of Peace On A Stone Than Ride In The Motor-car Of A Multi-millionaire And Feel The Peacelessness Of The Multi-millionaire Poisoning Me.

[man's] Life Consists In A Relation With All Things: Stone, Earth, Trees, Flowers, Water, Insects, Fishes, Birds, Creatures, Sun,rainbow, Children, Women, Other Men. But His Greatest And Final Relation Is With The Sun.

Give Up Bearing Children And Bear Hope And Love And Devotion To Those Already Born.

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.

Democracy And Equality Try To Denythe Mystic Recognition Of Difference And Innate Priority, The Joy Of Obedience And The Sacred Responsibility Of Authority.

If You Believe In Your Own Sex, And Won't Have It Done Dirt To: They'll Down You. It's The One Insane Taboo Left: Sex As A Naturaland Vital Thing.

You've Got To Know Yourself So You Can At Last Be Yourself.

Finding Yourself

The Human Consciousness Is Really Homogeneous. There Is No Complete Forgetting, Even In Death.

There Is The Unknown And The Unknowable Which Propounds All Creation. This We Cannot Love , We Can Only Accept It As A Term Of Our Own Limitation And Ratification. We Can Only Know That From The Unknown, Profound Desires Enter In Upon Us, And That The Fulfilling Of These Desires Is The Fulfilling Of Creation.

The Human Soul Needs Actual Beauty Even More Than Bread.

I Want Us To Be Together Without Bothering About Ourselves- To Be Really Together Because We Are Together, As If It Were A Phenomenon, Not A Thing We Have To Maintain By Our Own Effort.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She Herself Had Never Been Able To Be Altogether Herself: It Had Been Denied Her.

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

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.

That Is Your Trick, Your Bit Of Filthy Magic: Invisibility, And The Anaesthetic Power To Deaden My Attention In Your Direction.

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

If A Woman Hasn't Got A Tiny Streak Of Harlot In Her, She's A Dry Stick As A Rule.

The Brangwens Had Lived For Generations On The Marsh Farm, In The Meadows Where The Erewash Twisted Sluggishly Through Alder Trees, Separating Derbyshire From Nottinghamshire.

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

Evil, What Is Evil? There Is Only One Evil, To Deny Life As Rome Denied Etruria And Mechanical America Montezuma Still

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.

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.

Without Secrecy There Would Be No Pornography. But Secrecy And Modesty Are Two Utterly Different Things.

Are You Willing To Be Sponged Out, Erased, Cancelled, Made Nothing? Are You Willing To Be Made Nothing? Dipped Into Oblivion? If Not, You Will Never Really Change.

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.

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.

I Believe A Man Is Born First Unto Himself - For The Happy Developing Of Himself, While The World Is A Nursery, And The Pretty Things Are To Be Snatched For, And Pleasant Things Tasted; Some People Seem To Exist Thus Right To The End. But Most Are Born Again On Entering Manhood; Then They Are Born To Humanity, To A Consciousness Of All The Laughing, And The Never-ceasing Murmur Of Pain And Sorrow That Comes From The Terrible Multitudes Of Brothers.

Logic Might Be Unanswerable Because It Was So Absolutely Wrong.

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.

I Prefer Unlucky Things. Luck Is Vulgar. Who Wants What Luck Would Bring? I Don't.

A House O' Women Is As Dead As A House Wi' No Fire, To My Thinkin'. I'm Not A Spider As Likes To Corner Myself. I Like A Man About, If He's Only Something To Snap At.

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.

She Knew That The Horse, Born To Serve Nobly, Had Waited In Vain For Someone Noble To Serve. His Spirit Knew That Nobility Had Gone Out Of Men.

It's Autumn And Everybody Feels Like A Disembodied Spirit Then.

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 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.

Now Go Away Then, And Leave Me Alone. I Don't Want Any More Of Your Meretricious Persiflage.

You Feel Free In Australia. There Is Great Relief In The Atmosphere - A Relief From Tension, From Pressure, An Absence Of Control Of Will Or Form. The Skies Open Above You And The Areas Open Around You.

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

Chains That Bind

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.

I Am Convinced That The Air We Normally Breathe Is A Kind Of Water, And Men And Women Are A Species Of Fish.

I Cannot Get Any Sense Of An Enemy - Only Of A Disaster.

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.

Men Are Free When They Belong To A Living, Organic, Believing Community, Active In Fulfilling Some Unfulfilled, Perhaps Unrealized Purpose.

I Am Convinced That The Majority Of People To-day Have Good, Generous Feelings Which They Can Never Know, Never Experience, Because Of Some Fear, Some Repression. I Do Not Believe That People Would Be Villains, Thieves, Murderers And Sexual Criminals If They Were Freed From Legal Restraint.

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.

The Only Principle I Can See In This Life, Is That One Must Forfeit The Less For The Greater.

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.

Why, Why Are People All Balls Of Bitter Dust? Because They Won't Fall Off The Tree When They're Ripe. They Hang On To Their Old Positions When The Position Is Overpast, Till They Become Infested With Little Worms And Dry-rot.

I Wonder Which Was More Frightened Among Old Tribes -- Those Bursting Out Of Their Darkness Of Woods Upon All The Space Of Light, Or Those From The Open Tiptoeing Into The Forests.

Pornography Is The Attempt To Insult Sex, To Do Dirt On It.

The Nature Of The Infant Is Not Just A New Permutation-and-combination Of Elements Contained In The Natures Of The Parents. There Is In The Nature Of The Infant That Which Is Utterly Unknown In The Natures Of The Parents.

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

There Are Vast Realms Of Consciousness Still Undreamed Of -vast Ranges Of Experience, Like Humming Of Unseen Harps, We Know Nothing Of, Within Us.

I'd Be Ashamed To See A Woman Walking Around With My Name-label On Her, Address And Railway Station, Like A Wardrobe Trunk.

For Even Satire Is A Form Of Sympathy. It Is The Way Our Sympathy Flows And Recoils That Really Determines Our Lives. And Here Lies The Vast Importance Of The Novel, Properly Handled. It Can Inform And Lead Into New Places Our Sympathy Away In Recoil From Things Gone Dead. Therefore The Novel, Properly Handled, Can Reveal The Most Secret Places Of Life: For It Is The Passional Secret Places Of Life, Above All, That The Tide Of Sensitive Awareness Needs To Ebb And Flow, Cleansing And Freshening.

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.

When We Get Out Of The Glass Bottles Of Our Ego, And When We Escape Like Squirrels Turning In The Cages Of Our Personality And Get Into The Forests Again, We Shall Shiver With Cold And Fright But Things Will Happen To Us So That We Don't Know Ourselves. Cool, Unlying Life Will Rush In, And Passion Will Make Our Bodies Taut With Power, We Shall Stamp Our Feet With New Power And Old Things Will Fall Down, We Shall Laugh, And Institutions Will Curl Up Like Burnt Paper.

Truth Does Not Lie Beyond Humanity, But Is One Of The Products Of The Human Mind And Feeling.

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.

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.

I Don't Believe Any More In Democracy. But I Can't Believe In The Old Sort Of Aristocracy, Either, Nor Can I Wish It Back, Splendid As It Was. What I Believe In Is The Old Homeric Aristocracy, When The Grandeur Was Inside A Man, And He Lived In A Simple Wooden House.

When Passion Is Dead, Or Absent, Then The Magnificent Throb Of Beauty Is Incomprehensible And Even A Little Despicable.

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.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss.

... 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.

There's Always The Hyena Of Morality At The Garden Gate, And The Real Wolf At The End Of The Street.

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

Censors Are Dead Men Set Up To Judge Between Life And Death. For No Live, Sunny Man Would Be A Censor, He'd Just Laugh.

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.

The Great Home Of The Soul Is The Open Road.

You Don't Want To Be An Animal, You Want To Observe Your Own Animal Functions, So As To Get A Mental Thrill Out Of Them. It Is Allpurely Secondary--and More Decadent Than The Most Hide-bound Intellectualism.

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.

They Wanted Genuine Intimacy, But They Could Not Get Even Normally Near To Anyone, Because They Scorned To Take The First Steps, They Scorned The Triviality Which Forms Common Human Intercourse.

Love's A Dog In A Manger.

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 Moon Is A White Strange World, Great, White, Soft-seeming Globe In The Night Sky, And What She Actually Communicates To Me Across Space I Shall Never Fully Know. But The Moon That Pulls The Tides, And The Moon That Controls The Menstrual Periods Of Women, And The Moon That Touches The Lunatics, She Is Not The Mere Dead Lump Of The Astronomist. . . . When We Describe The Moon As Dead, We Are Describing The Deadness In Ourselves. When We Find Space So Hideously Void, We Are Describing Our Own Unbearable Emptiness.

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.

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

[hawthorne''s] Pious Blame Is A Chuckle Of Praise All The While.

I Believe That There Was A Great Age, A Great Epoch When Man Did Not Make War: Previous To 2000 B.c. Then The Self Had Not Reallybecome Aware Of Itself, It Had Not Separated Itself Off, The Spirit Was Not Yet Born, So There Was No Internal Conflict, And Hence No Permanent External Conflict.

All This Americanising And Mechanising Has Been For The Purpose Of Overthrowing The Past. And Now Look At America, Tangled In Her Own Barbed Wire, And Mastered By Her Own Machines.

Why Has Mankind Had Such A Craving To Be Imposed Upon? Why This Lust After Imposing Creeds, Imposing Deeds, Imposing Buildings, Imposing Language, Imposing Works Of Art? The Thing Becomes An Imposition And A Weariness At Last. Give Us Things That Are Alive And Flexible, Which Won't Last Too Long And Become An Obstruction And A Weariness. Even Michelangelo Becomes At Last A Lump And A Burden And A Bore. It Is So Hard To See Past Him.

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

When We Get Out Of The Glass Bottle Of Our Ego ... Things Will Happen To Us So That We Don't Know Ourselves. Cool, Unlying Life Will Rush In.

The Tragedy Is When You've Got Sex In The Head Instead Of Down Where It Belongs.

He Reflected On The Decay Of Mankind-the Decline Of The Human Race Into Folly And Weakness And Rottenness. 'be A Good Animal, True To Your Animal Instinct' Was His Motto.

What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You.

Thought Is A Man In His Wholeness, Wholly Attending.

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.

I Always Feel As If I Stood Naked For The Fire Of Almighty God To Go Through Me--and It's Rather An Awful Feeling. One Has To Be So Terribly Religious To Be An Artist.

While We Live, Let Us Live.

I Like Australia Less And Less. The Hateful Newness, The Democratic Conceit, Every Man A Little Pope Of Perfection.

The Horse, The Horse! The Symbol Of Surging Potency And Power Of Movement, Of Action.

Never Trust The Teller, Trust The Tale.

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

If Only We Could Live Two Lives: The First In Which To Make One's Mistakes, And The Second In Which To Profit By Them.

It Is Quite True, As Some Poets Said, That The God Who Created Man Must Have Had A Sinister Sense Of Humor, Creating Him A Reasonable Being, Yet Forcing Him To Take This Ridiculous Posture, And Driving Him With Blind Craving For This Ridiculous Performance.

At The Back Of My Life's Horizon, Where The Dreamings Of Past Lives Crowd.

I Want The Wonder Back Again, Or I Shall Die.

A Museum Is Not A First-hand Contact: It Is An Illustrated Lecture. And What One Wants Is The Actual Vital Touch.

The Trees Down The Boulevard Stand Naked In Thought, Their Abundant Summery Wordage Silenced, Caught In The Grim Undertow; Naked The Trees Confront Implacable Winter's Long, Cross-questioning Brunt.

A Young Man Is Afraid Of His Demon And Puts His Hand Over The Demon's Mouth Sometimes And Speaks For Him. And The Things The Young Man Says Are Very Rarely Poetry.

The Novel Is The One Bright Book Of Life. Books Are Not Life. They Are Only Tremulations On The Ether. But The Novel As A Tremulation Can Make The Whole Man Alive Tremble.

That She Bear Children Is Not A Woman's Significance. But That She Bear Herself, That Is Her Supreme And Risky Fate.

Art Is A Form Of Supremely Delicate Awareness And Atonement — Meaning Atoneness, The State Of Being At One With The Object.

O Pity The Dead That Are Dead, But Cannot Make The Journey, Still They Moan And Beat Against The Silvery Adamant Walls Of Life's Exclusive City.

The Living Moment Is Everything.

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.

The Moon! Artemis! The Great Goddess Of The Splendid Past Of Men! Are You Going To Tell Me She Is A Dead Lump?

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.

Why Is A Door-knob Deader Than Anything Else?

The History Of Our Era Is The Nauseating And Repulsive History Of The Crucifixion Of The Procreative Body For The Glorification Ofthe Spirit.

But That Is How Men Are! Ungrateful And Never Satisfied. When You Don't Have Them They Hate You Because You Won't; And When You Do Have Them They Hate You Again, For Some Other Reason. Or For No Reason At All, Except That They Are Discontented Children, And Can't Be Satisfied Whatever They Get, Let A Woman Do What She May.

The Spirit Of The Place Is A Strange Thing. Our Mechanical Age Tries To Override It. But It Does Not Succeed. In The End The Strange, Sinister Spirit Of The Place, So Diverse And Adverse In Differing Places, Will Smash Our Mechanical Oneness Into Smithereens.

No Form Of Love Is Wrong, So Long As It Is Love.

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

For, Of Course, Being A Girl, One’s Whole Dignity And Meaning In Life Consisted In The Achievement Of An Absolute, A Perfect, A Pure And Noble Freedom. What Else Did A Girl’s Life Mean?

Trending Author

Alistair MacLeod

William Barclay

Category