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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.

-D. H. Lawrence

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This Is What I

D. H. Lawrence

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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.

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The Past. The Golden Age Of The Past. What A Nostalgia We All Feel For It. Yet We Don't Want It When We Get It. Try The South Seas.

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

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

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

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.

What One Does In One's Art, That Is The Breath Of One's Being. What One Does In One's Life, That Is A Bagatelle For The Outsiders To Fuss About.

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.

The Goal Is To Know How Not-to-know.

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

My Soul Is My Great Asset And My Great Misfortune.

What Is The Knocking? What Is The Knocking At The Door In The Night? It Is Somebody Who Wants To Do Us Harm. No, No, It Is The Three Strange Angels. Admit Them, Admit Them.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

You Must Drop All Your Democracy. You Must Not Believe In ''the People.'' One Class Is No Better Than Another. It Must Be A Case Of Wisdom, Or Truth. Let The Working Classes Be Working Classes. That Is The Truth. There Must Be An Aristocracy Of People Who Have Wisdom, And There Must Be A Ruler: A Kaiser: No Presidents And Democracies.

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

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

And Can A Man His Own Quietus Make With A Bare Bodkin?

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

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.

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

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.

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

When Love Turns Into Dust, Money Becomes The Substitution.

A Woman Unsatisfied Must Have Luxuries. But A Woman Who Loves A Man Would Sleep On A Board

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

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 There Is In Life, It Seems To Me. But I Grant You, If You Deny The Variety Of Love You Deny Love Altogether. If You Try To Specialize Love Into One Set Of Accepted Feelings, You Wound The Very Soul Of Love. Love Must Be Multi-form, Else It Is Just Tyranny, Just Death

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

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!

Loud Peace Propaganda Makes War Seem Imminent.

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

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

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.

There Are Three Cures For Ennui: Sleep, Drink And Travel.

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

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

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 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.

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Especially The Male Of The Species

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?

No Man Is A Man Unless To His Woman He Is A Pioneer.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing But Love Has Made The Dog Lose His Wild Freedom, To Become The Servant Of Man.

America Is Neither Free Nor Brave, But A Land Of Tight, Iron-clanking Little Wills, Everybody Trying To Put It Over Everybody Else, And A Land Of Men Absolutely Devoid Of The Real Courage Of Trust, Trust In Life's Sacred Spontaneity. They Can't Trust Life Until They Can Control It.

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

The Great Living Experience For Every Man Is His Adventure Into The Woman. The Man Embraces In The Woman All That Is Not Himself, And From That One Resultant, From That Embrace, Comes Every New Action.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss.

Sex Is Really Only Touch, The Closest Of All Touch. And It's Touch We're Afraid Of.

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

Sleep Is Still Most Perfect, In Spite Of Hygienists, When It Is Shared With A Beloved.

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

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

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

Native American

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

One Doesn't Know, Till One Is A Bit At Odds With The World, How Much One's Friends Who Believe In One Rather Generously, Mean To One.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Ethical Principles

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

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.

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

Only This Shimmeriness Is The Real Living. The Shape Is A Dead Crust. The Shimmer Is Inside Really.

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

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

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.

I Hold That The Parentheses Are By Far The Most Important Parts Of A Non-business Letter.

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.

Go Deeper Than Love, For The Soul Has Greater Depths, Love Is Like The Grass, But The Heart Is Deep Wild Rock Molten, Yet Dense And Permanent.

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

In The Short Summer Night She Learned So Much. She Would Have Thought A Woman Would Have Died Of Shame... She Felt, Now, She Had Come To The Real Bedrock Of Her Nature, And Was Essentially Shameless. She Was Her Sensual Self, Naked An Unashamed. She Felt A Triumph, Almost A Vainglory. So! That Was How It Was! That Was Life! That Was How Onself Really Was! There Was Nothing Left To Disguise Or Be Ashamed Of. She Shared Her Ultimate Nakedness With A Man, Another Being.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Now Man Cannot Live Without Some Vision Of Himself. But Still Less Can He Live With A Vision That Is Not True To His Inner Experience And Inner Feeling.

They Say Geniuses Mostly Have Great Mothers. They Mostly Have Sad Fates.

What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You.

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 Fairest Thing In Nature, A Flower, Still Has Its Roots In Earth And Manure.

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

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

We Only Seem To Learn From Life That Life Doesn't Matter So Much As It Seemed To Do - It's Not So Burningly Important, After All, What Happens. We Crawl, Like Blinking Sea-creatures, Out Of The Ocean Onto A Spur Of Rock, We Creep Over The Promontory Bewildered And Dazzled And Hurting Ourselves, Then We Drop In The Ocean On The Other Side: And The Little Transit Doesn't Matter So Much.

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.

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

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

In The Dust Where We Have Buried The Silent Races And Their Abominations We Have Buried So Much Of The Delicate Magic Of Life.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss. There Is No Reciprocity. There Is Merely The Spending Away Of A Certain Force, And No Return. The Body Remains, In A Sense, A Corpse, After The Act Of Self-abuse. There Is No Change, Only Deadening. There Is What We Call Dead Loss. And This Is Not The Case In Any Act Of Sexual Intercourse Between Two People. Two People May Destroy One Another In Sex. But They Cannot Just Produce The Null Effect Of Masturbation.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

Patience! Patience! The World Is A Vast And Ghastly Intricacy Of Mechanism, And One Has To Be Very Wary, Not To Get Mangled By It.

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.

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.

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

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.

Why Is A Door-knob Deader Than Anything Else?

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

Why Were We Driven Out Of Paradise? Why Did We Fall Into This Gnawing Disease Of Unappeasable Dissatisfaction? Not Because We Sinned. Ah, No. All The Animals In Paradise Enjoyed The Sensual Passion Of Coition. Not Because We Sinned. But Because We Got Sex Into Our Head.

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

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.

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.

I Can't Do With Mountains At Close Quarters - They Are Always In The Way, And They Are So Stupid, Never Moving And Never Doing Anything But Obtrude Themselves.

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.

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

An Illusion Which Is A Real Experience Is Worth Having.

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.

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?

I Got The Blues Thinking Of The Future, So I Left Off And Made Some Marmalade. It's Amazing How It Cheers One Up To Shred Orange And Scrub The Floor.

One Realm We Have Never Conquered: The Pure Present.

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

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.

I Hate England And Its Hopelessness. I Hate [arnold] Bennett's Resignation. Tragedy Ought Really To Be A Great Big Kick At Misery.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I Shall Always Be A Priest Of Love.

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.

It Is No Good Casting Out Devils. They Belong To Us, We Must Accept Them And Be At Peace With Them.

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

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!

Only In A Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

What The Eye Doesn't See And The Mind Doesn't Know, Doesn't Exist.

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.

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.

My Belief Is In The Blood And Flesh As Being Wiser Than The Intellect. The Body-unconsciou S Is Where Life Bubbles Up In Us. It Is How We Know That We Are Alive, Alive To The Depths Of Our Souls And In Touch Somewhere With The Vivid Reaches Of The Cosmos.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

I Am A Man And Alive. For This Reason I Am A Novelist. And, Being A Novelist, I Consider Myself Superior To The Saint, Te Scientist, The Philosopher, And The Poet, Who Are All Great Masters Of Different Bits Of Man Alive, But Never Get The Whole Hog....only In The Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

One Must Learn To Love, And Go Through A Good Deal Of Suffering To Get To It, Like Any Knight Of The Grail, And The Journey Is Always Towards The Other Soul, Not Away From It. . . . To Love You Have To Learn To Understand The Other, More Than She Understands Herself, And To Submit To Her Understanding Of You. It Is Damnably Difficult And Painful, But It Is The Only Thing Which Endures.

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.

A Man Has No Religion Who Has Not Slowly And Painfully Gathered One Together, Adding To It, Shaping It; And One's Religion Is Never Complete And Final, It Seems, But Must Always Be Undergoing Modification.

Don't Be Sucked In By The Su-superior, Don't Swallow The Culture Bait, Don't Drink, Don't Drink And Get Beerier And Beerier, Do Learn To Discriminate.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

With A Woman, A Man Always Wants To Let Himself Go. And It Is Precisely With A Woman That He Should Never Let Himself Go ... But Stick To His Innermost Belief And Meet Her Just There.

Where Sanity Is There God Is.

Go Deeper Than Love, For The Soul Has Greater Depths, Love Is Like The Grass, But The Heart Is Deep Wild Rock Molten, Yet Dense And Permanent. Go Down To Your Deep Old Heart, And Lose Sight Of Yourself. And Lose Sight Of Me, The Me Whom You Turbulently Loved. Let Us Lose Sight Of Ourselves, And Break The Mirrors. For The Fierce Curve Of Our Lives Is Moving Again To The Depths Out Of Sight, In The Deep Living Heart.

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.

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 World Fears A New Experience More Than It Fears Anything. Because A New Experience Displaces So Many Old Experiences. . . . The World Doesn't Fear A New Idea. It Can Pigeon-hole Any Idea. But It Can't Pigeon-hole A Real New Experience.

New Experiences

One Sheds One's Sicknesses In Books - Repeats And Presents Again One's Emotions, To Be Master Of Them.

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

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.

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

The Soul Is A Very Perfect Judge Of Her Own Motions, If Your Mind Doesn't Dictate To Her.

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!

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.

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

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

After All, The World Is Not A Stage-not To Me: Nor A Theatre: Nor A Show-house Of Any Sort. And Art, Especially Novels, Are Not Little Theatres Where The Reader Sits Aloft And Watches...and Sighs, Commiserates, Condones And Smiles. That's What You Want A Book To Be: Because It Leaves You So Safe And Superior, With Your Two-dollar Ticket To The Show. And That's What My Books Are Not And Never Will Be...whoever Reads Me Will Be In The Thick Of The Scrimmage, And If He Doesn't Like It If He Wants A Safe Seat In The Audience-let Him Read Someone Else.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Spanish Wine, My God, It Is Foul, Catpiss Is Champagne Compared, This Is The Sulphurous Urination Of Some Aged Horse.

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

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.

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

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