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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

-D. H. Lawrence

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Mr Hemingway Does It

D. H. Lawrence

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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

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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.

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Man In His Relation To His Deity.

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.

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 Novel Is The Highest Example Of Subtle Interrelatedness That Man Has Discovered.

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!

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.

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

Men And Women Should Stay Apart, Till Their Hearts Grow Gentle Towards One Another Again.

The American Grips Himself, At The Very Sources Of His Consciousness, In A Grip Of Care: And Then, To So Much Of The Rest Of Life, Is Indifferent. Whereas, The European Hasn't Got So Much Care In Him, So He Cares Much More For Life And Living.

It Is Not Woman Who Claims The Highest In Man. It Is A Man's Own Religious Soul That Drives Him On Beyond Women, To His Supreme Activity. For His Highest, Man Is Responsible To God Alone.

And All The Time She Felt The Reflection Of His Hopelessness In Her. She Couldn't Quite, Quite Love In Hoplessness. And He, Being Hopeless, Couldn't Ever Love At All.

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.

When Science Starts To Be Interpretive It Is More Unscientific Even Than Mysticism.

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.

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

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.

That Which One Cannot Experience In Daily Life Is Not True For Oneself.

Happiness Was A Term Of Hypocrisy Used To Bluff Other People.

Curse The Blasted, Jelly-boned Swines, The Slimy, The Belly-wriggling Invertebrates, The Miserable Soddingrotters, The Flaming Sods, The Sniveling, Dribbling, Dithering, Palsied, Pulse-less Lot That Make Up England Today. They've Got White Of Egg In Their Veins, And Their Spunk Is That Watery It's A Marvel They Can Breed.

Don't Be On The Side Of The Angels, It's Too Lowering.

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.

Money Poisons You When You've Got It, And Starves You When You Haven't.

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.

At A Wavering Instant The Swallows Gave Way To Bats By The Ponte Vecchio . . . Changing Guard.

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

Poe Tried Alcohol, And Any Drug He Could Lay His Hands On. He Also Tried Any Human Being He Could Lay His Hands On.

We Are Dying, We Are Dying, We Are All Of Us Dying And Nothing Will Stay The Death-flood Rising Within Us And Soon It Will Rise On The World, On The Outside World.

... 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.

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

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

It's Not Art For Art's Sake, It's Art For My Sake.

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.

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

She Let Him Come Further, His Lips Came And Surging, Surging, Soft, Oh Soft, Yet On, Like The Powerful Surge Of Water, Irresistible, Till With A Little Blind Cry, She Broke Away.

Why Doesn't The Past Decently Bury Itself, Instead Of Sitting Waiting To Be Admired By The Present?

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

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

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.

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

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--

The Human Soul Needs Actual Beauty Even More Than Bread.

Freedom Is A Very Great Reality, But It Means Above All Things, Freedom From Lies.

Lies About Love We Are All Liars, Because The Truth Of Yesterday Becomes A Lie Tomorrow, Whereas Letters Are Fixed, And We Live By The Letter Of Truth. The Love I Feel For My Friend, This Year, Is Different From The Love I Felt Last Year. If It Were Not So, It Would Be A Lie. Yet We Reiterate Love! Love! Love! As If It Were A Coin With Fixed Value Instead Of A Flower That Dies, And Opens A Different Bud.

The Purest Lesson Our Era Has Taught Is That Man, At His Highest, Is An Individual, Single, Isolate, Alone, In Direct Soul-communication With The Unknown God, Which Prompts Within Him.

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.

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

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.

What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Brave People Add Up To An Aristocracy. The Democracy Of Thou-shalt-not Is Bound To Be A Collection Of Weak Men.

Primarily I Am A Passionately Religious Man, And My Novels Must Be Written From The Depth Of My Religious Experience.

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!

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.

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.

In Every Great Novel, Who Is The Hero All The Time? Not Any Of The Characters, But Some Unnamed And Nameless Flame Behind Them All.

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

And Woman Is The Same As Horses: Two Wills Act In Opposition Inside Her. With One Will She Wants To Subject Herself Utterly. With The Other She Wants To Bolt, And Pitch Her Rider To Perdition.

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.

I'll Do My Life Work, Sticking Up For The Love Between Man And Woman.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Vitally, The Human Race Is Dying. It Is Like A Great Uprooted Tree, With Its Roots In The Air. We Must Plant Ourselves Again In The Universe.

How Beautiful Maleness Is, If It Finds Its Right Expression.

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.

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

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

My Soul Is My Great Asset And My Great Misfortune.

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

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

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.

Religion Was Fading Into The Background. He Had Shovelled Away All The Beliefs That Would Hamper Him, Had Cleared The Ground, And Come More Or Less To The Bedrock Of Belief That One Should Feel Inside Oneself For Right Or Wrong, And Should Have The Patience To Gradually Realise One's God. Now Life Interested Him More.

Every New Stroke Of Civilization Has Cost The Lives Of Countless Brave Men, Who Have Fallen Defeated By The Dragon, In Their Efforts To Win The Apples Of The Hesperides, Or The Fleece Of Gold. Fallen In Their Efforts To Overcome The Old, Half Sordid Savagery Of The Lower Stages Of Creation, And Win The Next Stage.

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

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.

What A Frail, Easily Hurt, Rather Pathetic Thing A Human Body Is, Naked; Somehow A Little Unfinished, Incomplete!

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.

It Was As If Thousands And Thousands Of Little Roots And Threads Of Consciousness In Him And Her Had Grown Together Into A Tangled Mass, Till They Could Crowd No More, And The Plant Was Dying. Now Quietly, Subtly, She Was Unravelling The Tangle Of His Consciousness And Hers, Breaking The Threads Gently, One By One, With Patience And Impatience To Get Clear.

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

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

I Don't Like Your Miserable Lonely Single Front Name. It Is So Limited, So Meager; It Has No Versatility; It Is Weighted Down With The Sense Of Responsibility; It Is Worn Threadbare With Much Use; It Is As Bad As Having Only One Jacket And One Hat; It Is Like Having Only One Relation, One Blood Relation, In The World. Never Set A Child Afloat On The Flat Sea Of Life With Only One Sail To Catch The Wind.

The Words Themselves Are Clean, So Are The Things To Which They Apply. But The Mind Drags In A Filthy Association, Calls Up Some Repulsive Emotion. Well, Then, Cleanse The Mind, That Is The Real Job. It Is The Mind Which Is The Augean Stables, Not Language.

It's No Good Trying To Get Rid Of Your Own Aloneness. You've Got To Stick To It All Your Life. Only At Times, At Times, The Gap Will Be Filled In. At Times! But You Have To Wait For The Times. Accept Your Own Aloneness And Stick To It, All Your Life. And Then Accept The Times When The Gap Is Filled In, When They Come. But They've Got To Come. You Can't Force Them.

Oh, What A Catastrophe For Man When He Cut Himself Off From The Rhythm Of The Year, From His Unison With The Sun And The Earth. Oh, What A Catastrophe, What A Maiming Of Love When It Was A Personal, Merely Personal Feeling, Taken Away From The Rising And The Setting Of The Sun, And Cut Off From The Magic Connection Of The Solstice And The Equinox!

Eat And Carouse With Bacchus, Or Munch Dry Bread With Jesus, But Don't Sit Down Without One Of The Gods.

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.

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

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

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

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.

When Love Turns Into Dust, Money Becomes The Substitution.

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.

The Great Home Of The Soul Is The Open Road.

That's Just What A Woman Is. She Thinks She Knows What's Good For A Man, And She's Going To See He Gets It; And No Matter If He's Starving, He May Sit And Whistle For What He Needs, While She's Got Him, And Is Giving Him What's Good For Him.

Whatever Life May Be, And Whatever Horror Men Have Made Of It, The World Is A Lovely Place, A Magic Place, Something To Marvel Over. The World Is An Amazing Place.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This Is What I Believe: That I Am I. That My Soul Is A Dark Forest. That My Known Self Will Never Be More Than A Little Clearing In The Forest. That Gods, Strange Gods, Come Forth From The Forest Into The Clearing Of My Known Self, And Then Go Back. That I Must Have The Courage To Let Them Come And Go. That I Will Never Let Mankind Put Anything Over Me, But That I Will Try Always To Recognize And Submit To The Gods In Me And The Gods In Other Men And Women. There Is My Creed.

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

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

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

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.

If You Don't Like It, Alter It, And If You Can't Alter It, Put Up With It.

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.

An Illusion Which Is A Real Experience Is Worth Having.

Sex Is The Root Of Which Intuition Is The Foliage And Beauty Is The Flower.

You'll Never Succeed In Idealizing Hard Work. Before You Can Dig Mother Earth You've Got To Take Off Your Ideal Jacket. The Harder A Man Works, At Brute Labor, The Thinner Becomes His Idealism, The Darker His Mind.

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.

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.

And That Is ... How They Are. So Terribly Physically All Over One Another. They Pour Themselves One Over The Other Like So Much Melted Butter Over Parsnips. They Catch Each Other Under The Chin, With A Tender Caress Of The Hand, And They Smile With Sunny Melting Tenderness Into Each Other's Face.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Day Of The Absolute Is Over, And We're In For The Strange Gods Once More.

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

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.

I Love Trying Things And Discovering How I Hate Them.

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.

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.

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.

It's Terrible, Once You've Got A Man Into Your Blood!" She Said.

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

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.

Sunday Night Meant, In The Dark, Wintry, Rainy Midlands ... Anywhere Where Two Creatures Might Stand And Squeeze Together And Spoon.... Spooning Was A Fine Art, Whereas Kissing And Cuddling Are Calf-processes.

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.

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.

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.

I Should Like [people] To Like The Purely Individual Thing In Themselves, Which Makes Them Act In Singleness. And They Only Like To Do The Collective Thing.

I Want To Live My Life So That My Nights Are Not Full Of Regrets.

Oh, For The Wonder That Bubbles Into My Soul.

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

The Aztec Gods And Goddesses Are, As Far As We Have Known Anything About Them, An Unlovely And Unlovable Lot. In Their Myths There Is No Grace Or Charm, No Poetry. Only This Perpetual Grudge, Grudge, Grudging, One God Grudging Another, The Gods Grudging Men Their Existence, And Men Grudging The Animals. The Goddess Of Love Is Goddess Of Dirt And Prostitution, A Dirt-eater, A Horror, Without A Touch Of Tenderness.

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.

The Sphinx-riddle. Solve It, Or Be Torn To Bits, Is The Decree.

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.

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

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.

We Do All Like To Get Things Inside A Barb-wire Corral. Especially Our Fellow-men. We Love To Round Them Up Inside The Barb-wire Enclosure Of Freedom, And Make 'em Work. Work, You Free Jewel, Work! Shouts The Liberator, Cracking His Whip.

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.

The Human Being Is A Most Curious Creature. He Thinks He Has Got One Soul, And He Has Got Dozens.

A Book Lives As Long As It Is Unfathomed.

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

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.

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

I Think Societal Instinct Much Deeper Than Sex Instinct — And Societal Repression Much More Devastating.

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.

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

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.

How Ravished One Could Be Without Ever Being Touched. Ravished By Dead Words Become Obscene And Dead Ideas Become Obsessions.

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.

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

Sex And Beauty Are Inseparable, Like Life And Consciousness. And The Intelligence Which Goes With Sex And Beauty, And Arises Out Of Sex And Beauty, Is Intuition." "and They Rock, And They Rock, Through The Sensual Ageless Ages On The Depths Of The Seven Seas, And Through The Salt They Reel With Drunken Delight And In The Tropics Tremble They With Love And Roll With Massive, Strong Desire, Like Gods.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It Is Marriage, Perhaps, Which Had Given Man The Best Of His Freedom, Given Him His Little Kingdom Of His Own Within The Big Kingdom Of The State.... It Is A True Freedom Because It Is A True Fulfilment, For Man, Woman And Children. Do We Then Want To Break Marriage? If We Do Break It, It Means We All Fall To A Far Greater Extent Under The Direct Sway Of The State.

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.

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.

Can You Understand How Cruelly I Feel The Lack Of Friends Who Will Believe In Me A Bit?

If It Be Not True To Me, What Care I How True It Be.. Though It Be Not True To Thee, It's Gay And Gospel Truth To Me.

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.

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'd Wipe The Machines Off The Face Of The Earth Again, And End The Industrial Epoch Absolutely, Like A Black Mistake.

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

Finding Yourself

I Will Wait And Watch Till The Day Of David At Last Shall Be Finished, And Wisdom No More Fox-faced, And The Blood Gets Back Its Flame.

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.

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.

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.

Away With All Ideals. Let Each Individual Act Spontaneously From The Forever Incalculable Prompting Of The Creative Wellhead Within Him. There Is No Universal Law.

While We Live, Let Us Live.

There Is No Pornography Without A Secrecy.

Myth Is An Attempt To Narrate A Whole Human Experience, Of Which The Purpose Is Too Deep, Going Too Deep In The Blood And Soul, For Mental Explanation Or Description.

Along The Avenue Of Cypresses, All In Their Scarlet Cloaks And Surplices Of Linen, Go The Chanting Choristers, The Priests In Gold And Black, The Villagers. . . .

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

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