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Is Our Day Of Creative Life Finished? Does There Remain To Us Only The Strange, Awful Afterwards Of The Knowledge In Dissolution,the African Knowledge, But Different For Us, Who Are Blond And Blue-eyed From The North?.... There Was Another Way, The Way Of Freedom. There Was The Paradisal Entry Into Pure, Single Beingwhich Accepted The Obligation Of The Permanent Connection With Others, And With The Other, Submits To The Yoke And Leash Of Love, But Never Forfeits Its Own Proud Individual Singleness, Even While It Loves And Yields.

-D. H. Lawrence

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Is Our Day Of

D. H. Lawrence

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Is Our Day Of Creative Life Finished? Does There Remain To Us Only The Strange, Awful Afterwards Of The Knowledge In Dissolution,the African Knowledge, But Different For Us, Who Are Blond And Blue-eyed From The North?.... There Was Another Way, The Way Of Freedom. There Was The Paradisal Entry Into Pure, Single Beingwhich Accepted The Obligation Of The Permanent Connection With Others, And With The Other, Submits To The Yoke And Leash Of Love, But Never Forfeits Its Own Proud Individual Singleness, Even While It Loves And Yields.

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All Vital Truth Contains The Memory Of All That For Which It Is Not True.

The More Scholastically Educated A Man Is Generally, The More He Is An Emotional Boor.

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

Never Trust The Teller, Trust The Tale.

I Can Never Decide Whether My Dreams Are The Result Of My Thoughts, Or My Thoughts The Result Of My Dreams.

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.

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.

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.

Men! The Only Animal In The World To Fear.

It Is So Much More Difficult To Live With One's Body Than With One's Soul. One's Body Is So Much More Exacting: What It Won't Have It Won't Have, And Nothing Can Make Bitter Into Sweet.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And Still I Look For The Men Who Will Dare To Be Roses Of England Wild Roses Of England Men Who Are Wild Roses Of England With Metal Thorns, Beware! But Still More Brave And Still More Rare The Courage Of Rosiness In A Cabbage World Fragrance Of Roses In A Stale Stink Of Lies Rose-leaves To Bewilder The Clever Fools And Rose-briars To Strangle The Machine.

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

Man Has Little Needs And Deeper Needs. We Have Fallen Into The Mistake Of Living From Our Little Needs Till We Have Almost Lost Our Deeper Needs In A Sort Of Madness.

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 Mind Is "ashamed" Of The Blood. And The Blood Is Destroyed By The Mind, Actually. Hence Palefaces.

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.

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.

What's That As Flies Without Wings, Your Ladyship? Time! Time!

Beauty Is A Mystery. You Can Neither Eat It Nor Make Flannel Out Of It.

For God’s Sake, Let Us Be Men Not Monkeys Minding Machines Or Sitting With Our Tails Curled While The Machine Amuses Us, The Radio Or Film Or Gramophone. Monkeys With A Bland Grin On Our Faces.

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

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.

For {she} Had Adopted The Standard Of The Young: What There Was In The Moment Was Everything. And Moments Followed One Another Without Necessarily Belonging To One Another.

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

This Spring As It Comes Bursts Up In Bonfires Green, Wild Puffing Of Emerald Trees, And Flame-filled Bushes, Thorn-blossom Lifting In Wreaths Of Smoke Between Where The Wood Fumes Up And The Watery, Flickering Rushes. I Am Amazed At This Spring, This Conflagration Of Green Fires Lit On The Soil Of The Earth, This Blaze Of Growing, And Sparks That Puff In Wild Gyration, Faces Of People Streaming Across My Gaze.

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.

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.

The Love Between Man And Woman Is The Greatest And Most Complete Passion The World Will Ever See, Because It Is Dual, Because It Is Of Two Opposing Kinds.

Sex Is The One Thing You Cannot Really Swindle; And It Is The Centre Of The Worst Swindling Of All, Emotional Swindling.... Sex Lashes Out Against Counterfeit Emotion, And Is Ruthless, Devastating Against False Love.

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

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

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.

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

You Will Not Easily Get A Man To Believe That His Carnal Love For The Woman He Has Made His Wife Is As High A Love As That He Feltfor His Mother Or Sister.

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.

He Felt He Had Lost It For Good, He Knew What It Was To Have Been In Communication With Her, And To Be Cast Off Again. In Misery, His Heart Like A Heavy Stone, He Went About Unliving.

It Grew Late. Through The Open Door, Stealthily, Came The Scent Of Madonna Lilies, Almost As If It Were Prowling Abroad.

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

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

Softly, In The Dusk, A Woman Is Singing To Me; Taking Me Back Down The Vista Of Years, Till I See A Child Sitting Under The Piano, In The Boom Of The Tingling Strings And Pressing The Small, Poised Feet Of A Mother Who Smiles As She Sings.

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

I Have Lived Among Enough Painters And Around Studios To Have Had All The Theories - And How Contradictory They Are - Rammed Down My Throat. A Man Has To Have A Gizzard Like An Ostrich To Digest All The Brass-tacks And Wire Nails Of Modern Art Theories.

I Would Like [the Working Man] To Give Me Back Books And Newspapers And Theories. And I Would Like To Give Him Back, In Return, His Old Insouciance, And Rich, Original Spontaneity And Fullness Of Life.

Fullness Of Life

A Man Was Like A Child With His Appetites. A Woman Had To Yield Him What He Wanted, Or Like A Child He Would Probably Turn Nasty And Flounce Away And Spoil What Was A Very Pleasant Connection.

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.

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.

I Have A Very Great Fear Of Love. It Is So Personal. Let Each Bird Fly With Its Own Wings, And Each Fish Swim Its Own Course.--morning Brings More Than Love. And I Want To Be True To The Morning.

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

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

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.

The Deadly Hydra Now Is The Hydra Of Equality. Liberty, Equality And Fraternity Is The Three-fanged Serpent.

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 Weakness Of Modern Tragedy[is That] Transgression Against The Social Code Is Made To Bring Destruction, As Though The Social Code Worked Our Irrevocable Fate.

If I Had My Way, I Would Build A Lethal Chamber As Big As The Crystal Palace, With A Military Band Playing Softly, And A Cinematograph Working Brightly; Then I'd Go Out In The Back Streets And Main Streets And Bring Them In, All The Sick, The Halt, And The Maimed; I Would Lead Them Gently, And They Would Smile Me A Weary Thanks; And The Band Would Softly Bubble Out The 'hallelujah Chorus'.

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?

Any Novel Of Importance Has A Purpose. If Only The "purpose" Be Large Enough, And Not At Outs With The Passional Inspiration.

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.

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.

The #‎ Cosmos Is A Vast Living Body, Of Which We Are Still Parts.

Tragedy Is Like Strong Acid - It Dissolves Away All But The Very Gold Of Truth.

If We Had Reverence For Our Life, Our Life Would Take At Once Religious Form. But As It Is, In Our Filthy Irreverence, It Remains A Disgusting Slough, Where Each One Of Us Goes So Thoroughly Disguised In Dirt That We Are All Alike And Indistinguishab

One's Action Ought To Come Out Of An Achieved Stillness: Not To Be A Mere Rushing On.

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.

What We Want Is To Destroy Our False, Inorganic Connections, Especially Those Related To Money, And Re-establish The Living Organic Connections, With The Cosmos, The Sun And Earth, With Mankind And Nation And Family. Start With The Sun, And The Rest Will Slowly, Slowly Happen.

If You Cut A Thing Up, Of Course It Will Smell. Hence, Nothing Raises Such An Infernal Stink At Last, As Human Psychology.

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.

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.

Our Civilisation Cannot Afford To Let The Censor-moron Loose. The Censor-moron Does Not Really Hate Anything But The Living And Growing Human Consciousness.

The Nice Clean Intimacy Which We Now So Admire Between The Sexes Is Sterilizing. It Makes Neuters. Later On, No Deep, Magical Sex-life Is Possible.

She Was Always Waiting, It Seemed To Be Her Forte.

The Trains Roared By Like Projectiles Level On The Darkness, Fuming And Burning, Making The Valley Clang With Their Passage. They Were Gone, And The Lights Of The Towns And Villages Glittered In Silence.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss.

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Especially The Male Of The Species

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.

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

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

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

There Is A Brief Time For Sex, And A Long Time When Sex Is Out Of Place. But When It Is Out Of Place As An Activity There Still Should Be The Large And Quiet Space In The Consciousness Where It Lives Quiescent. Old People Can Have A Lovely Quiescent Sort Of Sex, Like Apples, Leaving The Young Quite Free For Their Sort.

You Can't Insure Against The Future, Except By Really Believing In The Best Bit Of You, And In The Power Beyond It.

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.

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

The Unhappiness Of A Wife With A Good Husband Is Much More Devastating Than The Unhappiness Of A Wife With A Bad Husband.

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.

But Having More Freedom She Only Became More Profoundly Aware Of The Big Want. She Wanted So Many Things. She Wanted To Read Great, Beautiful Books, And Be Rich With Them; She Wanted To See Beautiful Things, And Have The Joy Of Them For Ever; She Wanted To Know Big, Free People; And There Remained Always The Want She Could Put No Name To? It Was So Difficult. There Were So Many Things, So Much To Meet And Surpass. And One Never Knew Where One Was Going.

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 Should Think The American Admiration Of Five-minute Tourists Has Done More To Kill The Sacredness Of Old European Beauty And Aspiration Than Multitudes Of Bombs Would Have Done.

No Form Of Love Is Wrong, So Long As It Is Love, And You Yourself Honour What You Are Doing. Love Has An Extraordinary Variety Of Forms! And That Is All That There Is In Life, It Seems To Me.

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.

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?

When We Really Want To Go For Something Better, We Shall Smash The Old. Until Then, Any Sort Of Proposal, Or Making Proposals, Is No More Than A Tiresome Game For Self-important People.

All That We Know Is Nothing, We Are Merely Crammed Wastepaper Baskets, Unless We Are In Touch With That Which Laughs At All Our Knowing.

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.

Anatomy Presupposes A Corpse; Psychology Presupposes A World Of Corpses.

I've Never Seen A Wild Thing Feel Sorry For Itself.

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

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

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It's Bad Taste To Be Wise All The Time, Like Being At A Perpetual Funeral.

The Tiny Fish Enjoy Themselves In The Sea.

I Love Trying Things And Discovering How I Hate Them.

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.

There Was A Warmth Of Fury In His Last Phrases. He Meant She Loved Him More Than He Her. Perhaps He Could Not Love Her. Perhaps She Had Not In Herself That Which He Wanted. It Was The Deepest Motive Of Her Soul, This Self-mistrust. It Was So Deep She Dared Neither Realise Nor Acknowledge. Perhaps She Was Deficient. Like An Infinitely Subtle Shame, It Kept Her Always Back. If It Were So, She Would Do Without Him. She Would Never Let Herself Want Him. She Would Merely See.

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. There Is Not Any Part Of Me That Is Alone And Absolute Except My Mind, And We Shall Find That The Mind Has No Existence By Itself, It Is Only The Glitter Of The Sun On The Surfaces Of The Water.

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.

Sleep Is A Hint Of Lovely Oblivion.

Yea, Paris Is A Festive Ton -- A Festive Ton For All! Skate O'er On Joy -- Thin Crust Of Gilded, Polished Joy! What Matters It If Hell's Beneath?

Sometimes Life Takes Hold Of One, Carries The Body Along, Accomplishes One's History, And Yet Is Not Real, But Leaves Oneself As It Were Slurred Over.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

So As Long As You Can Forget Your Body You Are Happy And The Moment You Begin To Be Aware Of Your Body, You Are Wretched. So If Civilization Is Any Good, It Has To Help Us Forget Our Bodies, And Then Time Passes Happily Without Our Knowing It. Help Us Get Rid Of Our Bodies Altogether.

I Cannot Be A Materialist - But Oh, How Is It Possible That A God Who Speaks To All Hearts Can Let Belgravia Go Laughing To A Vicious Luxury, And Whitechapel Cursing To A Filthy Debauchery - Such Suffering, Such Dreadful Suffering - And Shall The Short Years Of Christ's Mission Atone For It All?

The Upshot Was, My Paintings Must Burn That English Artists Might Finally Learn.

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.

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.

Ours Is Essentially A Tragic Age, So We Refuse To Take It Tragically. The Cataclysm Has Happened, We Are Among The Ruins, We Start To Build Up New Little Habitats, To Have New Little Hopes. It Is Rather Hard Work: There Is Now No Smooth Road Into The Future: But We Go Round, Or Scramble Over The Obstacles. We’ve Got To Live, No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen.

While We Live, Let Us Live.

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.

The Great Mass Of Humanity Should Never Learn To Read Or Write.

Beware Of Absolutes. There Are Many Gods.

When The Emotional Soul Receives A Wounding Shock, The Soul Seems To Recover As The Body Recovers. But This Is Only In Appearance. Slowly, Slowly The Wound To The Soul Begins To Make Itself Felt, Like A Bruise, Which Only Slowly Deepens Its Terrible Ache, Till It Fills All The Psyche. And When We Think We Have Recovered And Forgotten, It Is Then That The Terrible After-effects Have To Be Encountered At Their Worst.

Having Achieved And Accomplished Love, Then The Man Passes Into The Unknown. He Has Become Himself, His Tale Is Told.

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.

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

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.

The Reaction To Any Word May Be, In An Individual, Either A Mob-reaction Or An Individual Reaction. It Is Up To The Individual To Ask Himself: Is My Reaction Individual, Or Am I Merely Reacting From My Mob-self? When It Comes To The So-called Obscene Words, I Should Say That Hardly One Person In A Million Escapes Mob-reaction.

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.

The Living Moment Is Everything.

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

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

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

Psychoanalysis Is Out, Under A Therapeutic Disguise, To Do Away Entirely With The Moral Faculty In Man.

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!

For Man, The Vast Marvel Is To Be Alive. For Man, As For Flower And Beast And Bird, The Supreme Triumph Is To Be Most Vividly, Most Perfectly Alive. Whatever The Unborn May Know, They Cannot Know The Beauty, The Marvel Of Being Alive In The Flesh. The Dead May Look After The Afterwards. But The Magnificent Here And Now Of Life In The Flesh Is Ours, And Ours Alone, And Ours Only For A Time.

We Have Buried So Much Of The Delicate Magic Of Life.

It Was Not The Passion That Was New To Her, It Was The Yearning Adoration. She Knew She Had Always Feared It, For It Left Her Helpless; She Feared It Still, Lest If Se Adored Him Too Much, Then She Would Lose Herself, Become Effaced, And She Did Not Want To Be Effaced, A Slave, Like A Savage Woman. She Must Not Become A Slave. She Feared Her Adoration, Yet She Would Not At Once Fight Against It.

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!

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.

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.

Literary Criticism Can Be No More Than A Reasoned Account Of The Feeling Produced Upon The Critic By The Book He Is Criticising.

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

Let Yourself Fall In Love. If You Have Not Done So Already, You Are Wasting Your Life.

Falling In Love

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

I Know The Greatness Of Christianity; It Is A Past Greatness.. I Live In 1924, And The Christian Venture Is Done.

Satire Exists For The Purpose Of Killing The Social Being [for The Sake Of] The True Individual, The Real Human Being.

Men And Women Aren't Really Dogs: They Only Look Like It And Behave Like It. Somewhere Inside There Is A Great Chagrin And A Gnawing Discontent.

Mr Hemingway Does It Extremely Well. Nothing Matters. Everything Happens. One Wants To Keep Oneself Loose. Avoid One Thing Only: Gettng Connected Up. Don't Get Connected Up. If You Get Held By Anything, Break It. Don't Be Held. Break It, And Get Away. Don't Get Away With The Idea Of Getting Somewhere Else. Just Get Away, For The Sake Of Getting Away. Beat It! "well, Boy, I Guess I'll Beat It." Ah, The Pleasure In Saying That

Marriage Is The Clue To Human Life, But There Is No Marriage Apart From The Wheeling Sun And The Nodding Earth, From The Strayingof The Planets And The Magnificence Of The Fixed Stars.

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

Art- Speech Is The Only Truth. An Artist Is Usually A Damned Liar But His Art, If It Be Art, Will Tell You The Truth Of His Day And That Is All That Matters. Away With Eternal Truth. The Truth Lives From Day To Day, And The Marvelous Plato Of Yesterday Is Chiefly Bosh Today.

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

The Essential Function Of Art Is Moral. But A Passionate, Implicit Morality, Not Didactic. A Morality Which Changes The Blood, Rather Than The Mind.

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?

Tragedy Ought Really To Be A Great Kick At Misery.

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.

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.

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.

Not I, Not I, But The Wind That Blows Through Me! A Fine Wind Is Blowing The New Direction Of Time.

Where The Electron Behaves And Misbehaves As It Will, Where The Forces Tie Themselves Up Into Knots Of Atoms And Come United.

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

You Don't Learn Algebra With Your Blessed Soul. Can't You Look At It With Your Clear Simple Wits?

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.

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

Since Obscenity Is The Truth Of Our Passion Today, It Is The Only Stuff Of Art -- Or Almost The Only Stuff.

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--

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

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

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

Logic Might Be Unanswerable Because It Was So Absolutely Wrong.

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.

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

Oh Literature, Oh The Glorious Art, How It Preys Upon The Marrow In Our Bones. It Scoops The Stuffing Out Of Us, And Chucks Us Aside. Alas!

Sleep Seems To Hammer Out For Me The Logical Conclusions Of My Vague Days, And Offer Them To Me As Dreams.

I Am Turned Into A Dream. I Feel Nothing, Or I Don't Know What I Feel. Yet It Seems To Me I Am Happy.

For How Can A Man Stand, Unless He Have Something Sure Under His Feet. Can A Man Tread The Unstable Water All His Life, And Call That Standing? Better Give In And Drown At Once.

I Shall Be Glad When You Have Strangled The Invincible Respectability That Dogs Your Steps.

Tragedy Looks To Me Like Man In Love With His Own Defeat. Which Is Only A Sloppy Way Of Being In Love With Yourself.

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

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

Life Is Ours To Be Spent, Not To Be Saved.

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

Chains That Bind

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

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