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

-D. H. Lawrence

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You Live By What

D. H. Lawrence

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

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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.

And Besides, Look At Elder Flowers And Bluebells-they Are A Sign That Pure Creation Takes Place - Even The Butterfly. But Humanity Never Gets Beyond The Caterpillar Stage -it Rots In The Chrysalis, It Never Will Have Wings.it Is Anti-creation, Like Monkeys And Baboons.

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.

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

The Italians Are Not Passionate: Passion Has Deep Reserves. They Are Easily Moved, And Often Affectionate, But They Rarely Have Any Abiding Passion Of Any Sort.

The Source Of All Life And Knowledge Is In #‎ Man And #‎ Woman , And The Source Of All Living Is In The Interchange And The Meeting And Mingling Of These Two: Man-life And Woman-life, Man-knowledge And Woman-knowledge , Man-being And Woman-being.

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

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

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.

Only Youth Has A Taste Of Immortality.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Who Knows The Power That Saturn Has Over Us, Or Venus? But It Is A Vital Power, Rippling Exquisitely Through Us All The Time.

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.

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

Oh, For The Wonder That Bubbles Into My Soul.

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.

Men Are Not Free When They're Doing Just What They Like. Men Are Only Free When They're Doing What The Deepest Self Likes. And There Is Getting Down To The Deepest Self! It Takes Some Diving.

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.

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 Glamour Of Childish Days Is Upon Me, My Manhood Is Cast Down In The Flood Of Remembrance.

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

When I Went To The Scientific Doctor I Realised What A Lust There Was In Him To Wreak His So-called Science On Me And Reduce Me To The Level Of A Thing. So I Said: Good-morning! And Left Him.

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

One Might Talk About The Sanity Of The Atom The Sanity Of Space The Sanity Of The Electron The Sanity Of Water- For It Is All Alive And Has Something Comparable To That Which We Call Sanity In Ourselves. The Only Oneness Is The Oneness Of Sanity.

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.

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

There Is Only One Thing That A Man Really Wants To Do, All His Life; And That Is, To Find His Way To His God, His Morning Star, Salute His Fellow Man, And Enjoy The Woman Who Has Come The Long Way With Him.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Great Home Of The Soul Is The Open Road.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The Lion Shall Never Lie Down With The Lamb. The Lion Eternally Shall Devour The Lamb, The Lamb Eternally Shall Be Devoured. Man Knows The Great Consummation In The Flesh, The Sensual Ecstasy, And That Is Eternal. Also The Spiritual Ecstasy Of Unanimity, That Is Eternal. But The Two Are Separate And Never To Be Confused.

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.

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.

My God, What A Clumsy Olla Putrida James Joyce Is! Nothing But Old Fags And Cabbage Stumps Of Quotations From The Bible And The Rest, Stewed In The Juice Of Deliberate, Journalistic Dirty-mindedness—what Old And Hard-worked Staleness, Masquerading As The All-new!

Let Man Only Approach His Own Self With A Deep Respect, Even Reverence For All That The Creative Soul, The God-mystery Within Us, Puts Forth. Then We Shall All Be Sound And Free. Lewdness Is Hateful Because It Impairs Our Integrity And Our Proud Being. The Creative, Spontaneous Soul Sends Forth Its Promptings Of Desire And Aspiration In Us. These Promptings Are Our True Fate, Which Is Our Business To Fulfill. A Fate Dictated From Outside, From Theory Or From Circumstance, Is A False Fate.

The Acrid Scents Of Autumn, Reminiscent Of Slinking Beasts, Make Me Fear

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

Be A Good Animal, True To Your Animal Instincts.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

God Doesn't Know Things. He Is Things.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The World Is Wonderful And Beautiful And Good Beyond One's Wildest Imagination. Never, Never, Never Could One Conceive What Love Is, Beforehand, Never. Life Can Be Great-quite God-like. It Can Be So. God Be Thanked I Have Proved It.

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.

Thought Is A Man In His Wholeness, Wholly Attending.

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

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.

Why, Oh Why Must One Grow Up, Why Must One Inherit This Heavy, Numbing Responsibility Of Living An Undiscovered Life? Out Of The Nothingness And The Undifferentiated Mass, To Make Something Of Herself! But What? In The Obscurity And Pathlessness To Take A Direction! But Whither? How Take Even One Step? And Yet, How Stand Still? This Was Torment Indeed, To Inherit The Responsibility Of One’s Own Life.

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.

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.

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.

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

They Wanted Genuine Intimacy, But They Could Not Get Even Normally Near To Anyone, Because They Scorned To Take The First Steps, They Scorned The Triviality Which Forms Common Human Intercourse.

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

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.

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

The Search For Happiness ... Always Ends In The Ghastly Sense Of The Bottomless Nothingness Into Which You Will Inevitably Fall If You Strain Any Further.

In Every Living Thing There Is The Desire For Love.

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

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

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.

America Does To Me What I Knew It Would Do: It Just Bumps Me. The People Charge At You Like Trucks Coming Down On You -- No Awareness. But One Tries To Dodge Aside In Time. Bump! Bump! Go The Trucks. And That Is Human Contact.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Only In A Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

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!

The Essential American Soul Is Hard, Isolate, Stoic, And A Killer. It Has Never Yet Melted.

The Novel Is A Perfect Medium For Revealing To Us The Changing Rainbow Of Our Living Relationships. The Novel Can Help Us To Live,as Nothing Else Can: No Didactic Scripture, Anyhow. If The Novelist Keeps His Thumb Out Of The Pan.

Love Is The Hastening Gravitation Of Spirit Towards Spirit, And Body Towards Body, In The Joy Of Creation.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 No Such Thing As Liberty. You Only Change One Sort Of Domination For Another. All We Can Do Is To Choose Our Master.

Naught Is Possessed, Neither Gold, Nor Land Nor Love, Nor Life, Nor Peace, Nor Even Sorrow Nor Death, Nor Yet Salvation. Say Of Nothing: It Is Mine. Say Only: It Is With Me.

But The Effort, The Effort! And As The Marrow Is Eaten Out Of A Man's Bones And The Soul Out Of His Belly, Contending With The Strange Rapacity Of Savage Life, The Lower Stage Of Creation, He Cannot Make The Effort Any More.

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

My Soul Is My Great Asset And My Great Misfortune.

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.

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

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

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

How Sure I Feel, How Warm And Strong And Happy For The Future! How Sure The Future Is Within Me; I Am Like A Seed With A Perfect Flower Enclosed.

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.

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

The True Unconscious Is The Well-head, The Fountain Of Real Motivity. The Sex Of Which Adam And Eve Became Conscious Derived Fromthe Very God Who Bade Them Be Not Conscious Of It.

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

The Great Crime Which The Moneyed Classes And Promoters Of Industry Committed In The Palmy Victorian Days Was The Condemning Of The Workers To Ugliness, Ugliness, Ugliness: Meanness And Formless And Ugly Surroundings, Ugly Ideals, Ugly Religion, Ugly Hope, Ugly Love, Ugly Clothes, Ugly Furniture, Ugly Houses, Ugly Relationship Between Workers And Employers. The Human Soul Needs Actual Beauty More Than Bread.

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.

You Love Me So Much, You Want To Put Me In Your Pocket. And I Should Die There Smothered.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Beware Of Absolutes. There Are Many Gods.

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.

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

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.

You Must Always Be A-waggle With 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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Good God, What Does It Matter? If Life Is A Tragedy, Or A Farce, Or A Disaster, Or Anything Else, What Do I Care! Let Life Be What It Likes. Give Me A Drink, That's What I Want Just Now.

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.

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

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.

My God, These Folks Don't Know How To Love - That's Why They Love So Easily.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Perhaps Only People Who Are Capable Of Real Togetherness Have That Look Of Being Alone In The Universe. The Others Have A Certain Stickiness, They Stick To The Mass.

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.

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

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.

Gods Die With Men Who Have Conceived Them. But The God-stuff Roars Eternally, Like The Sea, With Too Vast A Sound To Be Heard.

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.

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.

I Want Relations Which Are Not Purely Personal, Based On Purely Personal Qualities; But Relations Based Upon Some Unanimous Accord In Truth Or Belief, And A Harmony Of Purpose, Rather Than Of Personality. I Am Weary Of Personality. Let Us Be Easy And Impersonal, Not Forever Fingering Over Our Own Souls, And The Souls Of Our Acquaintances, But Trying To Create A New Life, A New Common Life, A New Complete Tree Of Life From The Roots That Are Within Us.

They Lived Freely Among The Students, They Argued With The Men Over Philosophical, Sociological And Artistic Matters, They Were Just As Good As The Men Themselves: Only Better, Since They Were Women.

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The Nearer A Conception Comes Towards Finality, The Nearer Does The Dynamic Relation, Out Of Which This Concept Has Arisen, Draw To A Close. To Know Is To Lose.

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

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

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.

I Can Give You A Spirit Love, I Have Given You This Long, Long Time; But Not Embodied Passion. See, You Are A Nun. I Have Given You What I Would Give A Holy Nun...in All Our Relations No Body Enters. I Do Not Talk To You Through The Senses - Rather Through The Spirit. That Is Why We Cannot Love In The Common Sense.

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

Finding Yourself

[during The Renaissance] The Italians Said, "we Are One In The Father: We Will Go Back." The Northern Races Said, "we Are One In Christ, We Will Go On.

I Always Feel As If I Stood Naked For The Fire Of Almighty God To Go Through Me--and It's Rather An Awful Feeling. One Has To Be So Terribly Religious To Be An Artist.

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.

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

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

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.

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

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Alexander Calder

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