Background Image

...

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.

-D. H. Lawrence

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

There Was A Warmth

D. H. Lawrence

...

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.

Views: 4

Topic

More From D. H. Lawrence

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.

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.

Only In A Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

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

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.

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.

Mankind Has Got To Get Back To The Rhythm Of The Cosmos.

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.

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?

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.

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Especially The Male Of The Species

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

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

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

The Dead Don't Die. They Look On And Help.

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

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

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

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

I Shall Always Be A Priest Of Love.

While We Live, Let Us Live.

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

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

As We All Know, Too Much Of Any Divine Thing Is Destruction

The Pyramids Of Egypt Will Not Last A Moment Compared To The Daisy.

The Great Home Of The Soul Is The Open Road.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Oh, For The Wonder That Bubbles Into My Soul.

Money Is A Sort Of Instinct. It's A Sort Of Property Of Nature In A Person To Make Money. It's Nothing You Do. It's No Trick You Play. It's A Sort Of Permanent Accident Of Your Own Nature; Once You Start, You Make Money, And You Go On. . . But You've Got To Begin. . . You've Got To Get In. You Can Do Nothing If You Are Kept Outside. You've Got To Beat Your Way In. Once You've Done That, You Can't Help It!

To The Puritan All Things Are Impure, As Somebody Says.

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

The Artist Usually Sets Out -- Or Used To -- To Point A Moral And Adorn A Tale. The Tale, However, Points The Other Way, As A Rule. Two Blankly Opposing Morals, The Artist's And The Tale's. Never Trust The Artist. Trust The Tale. The Proper Functions Of A Critic Is To Save The Tale From The Artist Who Created It.

A Little Morphine In All The Air. It Would Be Wonderfully Refreshing For Everyone.

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.

Loud Peace Propaganda Makes War Seem Imminent.

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.

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

In My Very Own Self, I Am Part Of My Family.

But The Act, Called The Sexual Act, Is Not For The Depositing Of Seed. It Is For Leaping Off Into The Unknown, As From A Cliff's Edge, Like Sappho Into The Sea.

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

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.

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 Living Moment Is Everything.

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

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.

Never Set A Child Afloat On The Flat Sea Of Life With Only One Sail To Catch The Wind.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Be Careful, Then, And Be Gentle About Death. For It Is Hard To Die, It Is Difficult To Go Through The Door, Even When It Opens.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rippling, Rippling, Rippling, Like A Flapping Overlapping Of Soft Flames, Soft As Feathers, Running To Points Of Brilliance, Exquisite, Exquisite And Melting Her All Molten Inside.

It's Better To Be Born Lucky Than Rich. If You're Rich, You May Lose Your Money, But If You're Born Lucky, You Will Always Have More Money.

When Man Has Nothing But His Will To Assert--even His Good-will--it Is Always Bullying. Bolshevism Is One Sort Of Bullying, Capitalism Another: And Liberty Is A Change Of Chains.

A Woman Has To Live Her Life, Or Live To Repent Not Having Lived It.

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

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

... 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.

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 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.

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.

Never Trust The Teller, Trust The Tale.

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.

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.

Aren't I Enough For You?' She Asked. 'no,' He Said. 'you Are Enough For Me, As Far As A Woman Is Concerned. You Are All Women To Me. But I Wanted A Man Friend, As Eternal As You And I Are Eternal.' (women In Love)

There Is Nothing To Save, Now All Is Lost, But A Tiny Core Of Stillness In The Heart Like The Eye Of A Violet.

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.

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

If We Sip The Wine, We Find Dreams Coming Upon Us Out Of The Imminent Night

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.

When All Comes To All, The Most Precious Element In Life Is Wonder. Love Is A Great Emotion, And Power Is Power. But Both Love And Power Are Based On Wonder.

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.

How To Begin To Educate A Child. First Rule: Leave Him Alone. Second Rule: Leave Him Alone. Third Rule: Leave Him Alone. That Is The Whole Beginning.

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

When Love Turns Into Dust, Money Becomes The Substitution.

No Absolute Is Going To Make The Lion Lie Down With The Lamb: Unless The Lamb Is Inside.

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.

Sleep Is Still Most Perfect, In Spite Of Hygienists, When It Is Shared With A Beloved. The Warmth, The Security And Peace Of Soul, The Utter Comfort From The Touch Of The Other, Knits The Sleep, So That It Takes The Body And Soul Completely In Its Healing.

What Sex Is, We Don't Know, But It Must Be Some Sort Of Fire. For It Always Communicates A Sense Of Warmth, Of Glow. And When This Glow Becomes A Pure Shine, Then We Feel The Sense Of Beauty. We All Have The Fire Of Sex Slumbering Or Burning Inside Us. If We Live To Be Ninety, It Is Still There. Or, If It Dies, We Become One Of Those Ghastly Living Corpses Which Are Unfortunately Becoming More Numerous In The World.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Nothing That Comes From The Deep, Passional Soul Is Bad, Or Can Be Bad.

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

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!

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.

Never Trust The Artist. Trust The Tale. The Proper Function Of The Critic Is To Save The Tale From The Artist Who Created It.

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

Persephone Herself Is But A Voice Or A Darkness Invisible Enfolded In The Deeper Dark Of The Arms Plutonic, And Pierced With The Passion Of Dense Gloom, Among The Splendor Of Torches Of Darkness, Shedding Darkness On The Lost Bride And Her Groom.

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

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

The Human Soul Needs Actual Beauty Even More Than Bread.

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.

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

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?

Do Not Allow To Slip Away From You Freedoms The People Who Came Before You Won With Such Hard Knocks.

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

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.

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.

He Who Gets Nearer The Sun Is Leader, The Aristocrat Of Aristocrats, Or He Who, Like Dostoevsky, Gets Nearest The Moon Of Our Non-being.

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.

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.

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

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

The Tiny Fish Enjoy Themselves In The Sea.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Thought Is A Man In His Wholeness, Wholly Attending.

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 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.

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

Ours Is Essentially A Tragic Age, So We Refuse To Take It Tragically.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If A Novel Reveals True And Vivid Relationships, It Is A Moral Work, No Matter What The Relationships Consist In. If The Novelisthonours The Relationship In Itself, It Will Be A Great Novel.

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

Build Then The Ship Of Death, For You Must Take The Longest Journey, To Oblivion.

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.

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

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 More I See Of Democracy The More I Dislike It. It Just Brings Everything Down To The Mere Vulgar Level Of Wages And Prices, Electric Light And Water Closets, And Nothing Else.

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

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.

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

There Is No Smooth Road Into The Future: But We Go Round, Or Scramble Over The Obstacles.

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

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

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

There Is No Evolving, Only Unfolding. The Lily Is In The Bit Of Dust Which Is Its Beginning, Lily And Nothing But Lily: And The Lily In Blossom Is A Ne Plus Ultra: There Is No Evolving Beyond.

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

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

The Picture Must All Come Out Of The Artist's Inside, Awareness Of Forms And Figures... It Is More Than Memory. It Is The Image As It Lives In The Consciousness, Alive Like A Vision, But Unknown.

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

Only Youth Has A Taste Of Immortality.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Finding Yourself

I Do Esteem Individual Liberty Above Everything. What Is A Nation For, But To Secure The Maximum Liberty To Every Individual?

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

Ethical Principles

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

The World Of Men Is Dreaming, It Has Gone Mad In Its Sleep, And A Snake Is Strangling It, But It Can't Wake Up.

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

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

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--

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

A Man Will Part With Anything So Long As He's Drunk, And You're Drunk With Him.

If You Try To Nail Anything Down, In The Novel, Either It Kills The Novel, Or The Novel Gets Up And Walks Away With The Nail.

Humanity Is Less, Far Less Than The Individual, Because The Individual May Sometimes Be Capable Of Truth, And Humanity Is A Tree Of Lies.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

People Always Make War When They Say They Love Peace.

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?

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.

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.

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?

Trending Author

Theodore Roethke

Charles Alexander Eastman

Category