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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.

-D. H. Lawrence

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What Sex Is, We

D. H. Lawrence

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

If I Take My Whole, Passionate, Spiritual And Physical Love To The Woman Who In Return Loves Me, That Is How I Serve God. And My Hymn And My Game Of Joy Is My Work.

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep Is A Hint Of Lovely Oblivion.

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.

Loud Peace Propaganda Makes War Seem Imminent.

The Man Who Had Died Looked Nakedly On Life, And Saw A Vast Resoluteness Everywhere Flinging Itself Up In Stormy Or Subtle Wave-crests.... Always The Man Who Had Died Saw Not The Bird Alone, But The Short, Sharp Wave Of Life Of Which The Bird Was The Crest.

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.

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.

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

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

I Am In Love And, My God, It Is The Greatest Thing That Can Happen To A Man.

Falling In Love

Falling In Love With You

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.

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

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.

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.

There's Nothing Wrong With Sexual Feelings In Themselves, So Long As They Are Straightforward And Not Sneaking Or Sly. The Right Sort Of Sex Stimulus Is Invaluable To Human Daily Life. Without It The World Grows Grey.

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

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

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

Most Fatal, Most Hateful Of All Things Is Bullying.... Sensual Bullying Of Course Is Fairly Easily Detected. What Is More Dangerous Is Ideal Bullying. Bullying People Into What Is Ideally Good For Them.

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

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.

And Every True Artist Is The Salvation Of Every Other. But Only Artists Produce For Each Other The World That Is Fit To Live In.

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

We Have Lost The Art Of Living, And In The Most Important Science Of All, The Science Of Daily Life, The Science Of Behavior, We Are Complete Ignoramuses. We Have Psychology Instead.

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

How I Hate The Attitude Of Ordinary People To Life. How I Loathe Ordinariness! How From My Soul I Abhor Nice Simple People, With Their Eternal Price List. It Makes My Blood Boil.

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.

Whether I Get On In The World Is A Question; But I Certainly Don't Get On Very Well With The World.

He Had Made A Passionate Study Of Education, Only To Come, Gradually, To The Knowledge That Education Is Nothing But The Process Of Building Up, Gradually, A Complete Unit Of Consciousness. And Each Unit Of Consciousness Is The Living Unit Of That Great Social, Religious, Philosophic Idea Towards Which Humankind, Like An Organism Seeking Its Final Form, Is Laboriously Growing.

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 Human Soul Needs Actual Beauty Even More Than Bread.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

There Is No Pornography Without A Secrecy.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Never Know When I Sit Down, Just What I Am Going To Write. I Make No Plan; It Just Comes, And I Don't Know Where It Comes From.

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

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.

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

Death Is The Only Pure, Beautiful Conclusion Of A Great Passion.

It Is Only When Men Lose Their Contact With This Eternal Life-flame, And Become Merely Personal, Things In Themselves, Instead Ofthings Kindled In The Flame, That The Fight Between Man And Woman Begins.

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

Let There Be An End ... Of All This Welter Of Pity, Which Is Only Self-pity Reflected Onto Some Obvious Surface.

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

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.

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

Native American

Nothing Is As Bad As A Marriage That's A Hopeless Failure.

Only In A Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

The True Artist Doesn't Substitute Immorality For Morality. On The Contrary, He Always Substitutes A Finer Morality For A Grosser One.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

No Creature Is Fully Itself Till It Is, Like The Dandelion, Opened In The Bloom Of Pure Relationship To The Sun, The Entire Living Cosmos.

When I Hear Modern People Complain Of Being Lonely Then I Know What Has Happened. They Have Lost The Cosmos.

Now In November Nearer Comes The Sun Down The Abandoned Heaven.

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

For Whereas The Mind Works In Possibilities, The Intuitions Work In Actualities, And What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You. Whereas What You Mentally Or "consciously" Desire Is Nine Times Out Of Ten Impossible; Hitch Your Wagon To A Star, Or You Will Just Stay Where You Are.

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

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

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

And Venus Among The Fishes Skips And Is A She-dolphin She Is The Gay, Delighted Porpoise Sporting With Love And The Sea She Is The Female Tunny-fish, Round And Happy Among The Males And Dense With Happy Blood, Dark Rainbow Bliss In The Sea.

It Is A Fine Thing To Establish One's Own Religion In One's Heart, Not To Be Dependent On Tradition And Second-hand Ideals. Life Will Seem To You, Later, Not A Lesser, But A Greater Thing.

The Grim Frost Is At Hand, When Apples Will Fall Thick, Almost Thunderous, On The Hardened Earth.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Falling In Love

Whatever Men You Take, Keep The Idea Of Man Intact: Let Your Soul Wait Whether Your Body Does Or Not.

Money Is The Seal And Stamp Of Success.

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.

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

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

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.

My Wife Has A Beastly Habit Of Comparing Poetry -- All Literature In Fact -- To The Droppings Of The Goats Among The Rocks -- Mere Excreta That Fertilises The Ground It Falls On.

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

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.

Literature Is A Toil And A Snare, A Curse That Bites Deep.

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

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

Most Men Have A Deadness In Them That Frightens Me So Because Of My Own Deadness. Why Can't Men Get Their Life Straight, Like St.mawr, And Then Think? Why Can't They Think Quick, Mother: Quick As A Woman: Only Farther Than We Do?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The Only Reality Was Nothingness, And Over It A Hypocrisy Of Words.

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

Oh, What A Catastrophe, What A Maiming Of Love When It Was Made Personal, Merely Personal Feeling. This Is What Is The Matter With Us: We Are Bleeding At The Roots Because We Are Cut Off From The Earth And Sun And Stars. Love Has Become A Grinning Mockery Because, Poor Blossom, We Plucked It From Its Stem On The Tree Of Life And Expected It To Keep On Blooming In Our Civilized Vase On The Table.

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?

The Great Home Of The Soul Is The Open Road.

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

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

When Along The Pavement, Palpitating Flames Of Life, People Flicker Around Me, I Forget My Bereavement, The Gap In The Great Constellation, The Place Where A Star Used To Be

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

The Mind Can Assert Anything And Pretend It Has Proved It. My Beliefs I Test On My Body, On My Intuitional Consciousness, And When I Get A Response There, Then I Accept.

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.

Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out, Especially If You're Married And Her Name's Bertha

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

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.

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

Comes Over One An Absolute Necessity To Move. And What Is More, To Move In Some Particular Direction. A Double Necessity Then: To Get On The Move, And To Know Whither.

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?

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

Water Is H2o, Hydrogen Two Parts, Oxygen One, But There Is Also A Third Thing, That Makes It Water And Nobody Knows What That Is.

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.

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

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.

When One Jumps Over The Edge, One Is Bound To Land Somewhere.

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

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

And Whoever Forces Himself To Love Anybody Begets A Murderer In His Own Body.

I Do Esteem Individual Liberty Above Everything.

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 Love Italian Opera - It's So Reckless. Damn Wagner, And His Bellowings At Fate And Death. Damn Debussy, And His Averted Face. I Like The Italians Who Run All On Impulse, And Don't Care About Their Immortal Souls, And Don't Worry About The Ultimate.

She Had Borne So Long The Cruelty Of Belonging To Him And Not Being Claimed By Him.

One Must Learn To Love, And Go Through A Good Deal Of Suffering To Get To It... And The Journey Is Always Towards The Other Soul.

The 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

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

And Yet - And Yet - One's Kite Will Rise On The Wind As Far As Ever One Has String To Let It Go. It Tugs And Tugs And Will Go, And One Is Glad The Further It Goes, Even If Everybody Else Is Nasty About It.

She Is My First, Great Love. She Was A Wonderful, Rare Woman - You Do Not Know; As Strong, And Steadfast, And Generous As The Sun. She Could Be As Swift As A White Whiplash, And As Kind And Gentle As Warm Rain, And As Steadfast As The Irreducible Earth Beneath Us.

While We Live, Let Us Live.

Only Youth Has A Taste Of Immortality.

I Believe That A Man Is Converted When First He Hears The Low, Vast Murmur Of Life, Of Human Life, Troubling His Hitherto Unconscious Self.

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

I Believe The Nearest I've Come To Perfect Love Was With A Young Coal-miner When I Was About 16.

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

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.

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

They Say The Sea Is Cold, But The Sea Contains The Hottest Blood Of All, And The Wildest, The Most Urgent.

Do Come Back And Draw The Ferrets, They Are The Most Lovely Noble Darlings In The World.

Oh Build Your Ship Of Death. Oh Build It! For You Will Need It. For The Voyage Of Oblivion Awaits You.

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.

Nobody Knows You. You Don't Know Yourself. And I, Who Am Half In Love With You, What Am I In Love With? My Own Imaginings?

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.

When Love Turns Into Dust, Money Becomes The Substitution.

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

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.

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

Unless One Decorates One's House For Oneself Alone, Best Leave It Bare, For Other People Are Walleyed.

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

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

Death Is ... A Travelling Asunder Into Elemental Chaos. And From The Elemental Chaos All Is Cast Forth Again Into Creation. Therefore Death Also Is But A Cul-de-sac, A Melting-pot.

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

Europe Is, Perhaps, The Least Worn-out Of The Continents, Because It Is The Most Lived In. A Place That Is Lived In Lives.

Creatures That Hang Themselves Up Like An Old Rag, To Sleep; And Disgustingly Upside Down. Hanging Upside Down Like Rows Of Disgusting Old Rags And Grinning In Their Sleep. Bats!

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.

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

Finding Yourself

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.

How Can Any Man Be Free Without A Soul Of His Own, That He Believes In And Won't Sell At Any Price?

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.

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.

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.

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

Thought Is A Man In His Wholeness, Wholly Attending.

Men Fight For Liberty And Win It With Hard Knocks. Their Children, Brought Up Easy, Let It Slip Away Again, Poor Fools. And Their Grandchildren Are Once More Slaves.

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.

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.

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

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.

But Then Peace, Peace! I Am So Mistrustful Of It: So Much Afraid That It Means A Sort Of Weakness And Giving In.

The Sense Of Wonder, That Is Our Sixth Sense.

Sense Of Wonder

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.

People Always Make War When They Say They Love Peace.

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.

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.

Ah, Then, Upon My Bedroom I Do Draw The Blind To Hide The Garden, Where The Moon Enjoys The Open Blossoms As They Straw Their Beauty For His Taking, Boon For Boon. And I Do Lift My Aching Arms To You, And I Do Lift My Anguished, Avid Breast, And I Do Weep For Very Pain Of You, And Fling Myself At The Doors Of Sleep, For Rest.

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