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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.

-D. H. Lawrence

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You Must Drop All

D. H. Lawrence

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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.

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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.

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.

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

Tragedy Ought Really To Be A Great Kick At Misery.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Design In Art, Is A Recognition Of The Relation Between Various Things, Various Elements In The Creative Flux. You Can't Invent A Design. You Recognize It, In The Fourth Dimension. That Is, With Your Blood And Your Bones, As Well As With Your Eyes.

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

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

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

The Profoundest Of All Sensualities Is The Sense Of Truth And The Next Deepest Sensual Experience Is The Sense Of Justice.

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

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.

People Always Make War When They Say They Love Peace.

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.

Try To Find Your Deepest Issue In Every Confusion, And Abide By That.

One Should Be Religious In Everything, Have God, Whatever God Might Be, Present In Everything.

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

Only At His Maximum Does An Individual Surpass All His Derivative Elements, And Become Purely Himself. And Most People Never Get There. In His Own Pure Individuality A Man Surpasses His Father And Mother, And Is Utterly Unknown To Them.

The Horse, The Horse! The Symbol Of Surging Potency And Power Of Movement, Of Action.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

That's How Women Are With Me " Said Paul. "they Want Me Like Mad But They Don't Want To Belong To Me.

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

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.

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

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

I Am Sure No Other Civilization, Not Even The Romans, Has Showed Such A Vast Proportion Of Ignominious And Degraded Nudity, And Ugly, Squalid Dirty Sex. Because No Other Civilization Has Driven Sex Into The Underworld, And Nudity To The W.c.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Love Between Man And Woman Is The Greatest And Most Complete Passion The World Will Ever See, Because It Is Dual, Because It Is Of Two Opposing Kinds.

We Make A Mistake Forsaking England And Moving Out Into The Periphery Of Life. After All, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- As Far As We Go, They Are Only The Negation Of What We Ourselves Stand For And Are: And We're Rather Like Jonahs Running Away From The Place We Belong.

For How Can A Man Stand, Unless He Have Something Sure Under His Feet. Can A Man Tread The Unstable Water All His Life, And Call That Standing? Better Give In And Drown At Once.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We Have To Hate Our Immediate Predecessors, To Get Free From Their Authority.

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

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.

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

The Whole Point About The True Unconscious Is That It Is All The Time Moving Forward, Beyond The Range Of Its Own Fixed Laws Or Habits. It Is No Good Trying To Superimpose An Ideal Nature Upon The Unconscious.

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

It Is Quite True, As Some Poets Said, That The God Who Created Man Must Have Had A Sinister Sense Of Humor, Creating Him A Reasonable Being, Yet Forcing Him To Take This Ridiculous Posture, And Driving Him With Blind Craving For This Ridiculous Performance.

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

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

Those That Go Searching For Love Only Make Manifest Their Own Lovelessness, And The Loveless Never Find Love, Only The Loving Find Love, And They Never Have To Seek For It.

What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You.

The Real Tragedy Of England, As I See It, Is The Tragedy Of Ugliness. The Country Is So Lovely: The Man-made England Is So Vile.

I Never Knew How Soothing Trees Are-many Trees And Patches Of Open Sunlight, And Tree Presences; It Is Almost Like Having Another Being.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I See A Redness Suddenly Come Into The Evening's Anxious Breast-- 'tis The Wound Of Love Goes Home!

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

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

A Book Lives As Long As It Is Unfathomed.

[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.

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.

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

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 English People On The Whole Are Surely The Nicest People In The World, And Everybody Makes Everything So Easy For Everyone Else, That There Is Almost Nothing To Resist At All.

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

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

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

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

She Looked At Him, And Oh, The Weariness To Her, Of The Effort To Understand Another Language, The Weariness Of Hearing Him, Attending To Him, Making Out Who He Was, As He Stood There Fair-bearded And Alien, Looking At Her. She Knew Something Of Him, Of His Eyes. But She Could Not Grasp Him. She Closed Her Eyes.

That Was The Birth Of Sin. Not Doing It, But Knowing About It. Before The Apple, [adam And Eve] Had Shut Their Eyes And Their Minds Had Gone Dark. Now, They Peeped And Pried And Imagined. They Watched Themselves.

The Only Rule Is, Do What You Really, Impulsively, Wish To Do. But Always Act On Your Own Responsibility, Sincerely. And Have The Courage Of Your Own Strong Emotion.

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.

Towns Oftener Swamp One Than Carry One Out Onto The Big Ocean Of Life.

The Map Appears To Us More Real Than The Land.

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.

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

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

There Is No Pornography Without A Secrecy.

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

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

Was His Life Nothing? Had He Nothing To Show, No Work? He Did Not Count His Work, Anyone Could Have Done It. What Had He Known, But The Long, Marital Embrace With His Wife. Curious, That This Was What His Life Amounted To! At Any Rate, It Was Something, It Was Eternal. He Would Say So To Anybody, And Be Proud Of It. He Lay With His Wife In His Arms, And She Was Still His Fulfillment, Just The Same As Ever. And That Was The Be-all And The End-all. Yes, And He Was Proud Of It.

The 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.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss.

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.

A Snake Came To My Water Trough On A Hot, Hot Day, And I In Pajamas For The Heat, To Drink There.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Sight Is The Least Sensual Of All The Senses. And We Strain Ourselves To See, See, See--everything, Everything Through The Eye, Inone Mode Of Objective Curiosity.

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

I'm Not Sure If A Mental Relation With A Woman Doesn't Make It Impossible To Love Her. To Know The Mind Of A Woman Is To End In Hating Her. Love Means The Pre-cognitive Flow...it Is The Honest State Before The Apple.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 Was Not The Passion That Was New To Her, It Was The Yearning Adoration. She Knew She Had Always Feared It, For It Left Her Helpless; She Feared It Still, Lest If Se Adored Him Too Much, Then She Would Lose Herself, Become Effaced, And She Did Not Want To Be Effaced, A Slave, Like A Savage Woman. She Must Not Become A Slave. She Feared Her Adoration, Yet She Would Not At Once Fight Against It.

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.

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

The Real Trouble About Women Is That They Must Always Go On Trying To Adapt Themselves To Men's Theories Of Women, As They Alwayshave Done. When A Woman Is Thoroughly Herself, She Is Being What Her Type Of Man Wants Her To Be. When A Woman Is Hysterical It's Because She Doesn't Quite Know What To Be, Which Pattern To Follow, Which Man's Picture Of Woman To Live Up To.

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.

The More I Live, The More I Realize What Strange Creatures Human Beings Are. Some Of Them Might Just As Well Have A Hundred Legs, Like A Centipede, Or Six, Like A Lobster. The Human Consistency And Dignity One Has Been Led To Expect From One's Fellow-man Seem Actually Non-existent. One Doubts If They Exist To Any Startling Degree Even In Oneself.

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.

There Is A Brief Time For Sex, And A Long Time When Sex Is Out Of Place. But When It Is Out Of Place As An Activity There Still Should Be The Large And Quiet Space In The Consciousness Where It Lives Quiescent. Old People Can Have A Lovely Quiescent Sort Of Sex, Like Apples, Leaving The Young Quite Free For Their Sort.

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

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

The Only History Is A Mere Question Of One's Struggle Inside Oneself. But That Is The Joy Of It. One Need Neither Discover Americas Nor Conquer Nations, And Yet One Has As Great A Work As Columbus Or Alexander, To Do.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

We Can Understand That The Fathers Of The Church In The East Wanted Apocalypse Left Out Of The New Testament. But Like Judas Among The Disciples, It Was Inevitable That It Should Be Included. The Apocalypse Is The Feet Of Clay To The Grand Christian Image. And Down Crashes The Image, On The Weakness Of These Very Feet. There Is Jesus--but There Is Also John The Divine. There Is Christian Love--and There Is Christian Envy. The Former Would "save" The World--the Latter Will Never Be Satisfied Till It Has Destroyed The World. They Are Two Sides Of The Same Medal.

I Should Feel The Air Move Against Me, And Feel The Things I Touched, Instead Of Having Only To Look At Them. I'm Sure Life Is All Wrong Because It Has Become Much Too Visual - We Can Neither Hear Nor Feel Nor Understand, We Can Only See. I'm Sure That Is Entirely Wrong.

One Should Stick By One's Soul, And By Nothing Else. In One's Soul, One Knows The Truth From The Untruth, And Life From Death. And If One Betrays One's Own Soul-knowledge One Is The Worst Of Traitors.

I Love Trying Things And Discovering How I Hate Them.

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

To Our Senses, The Elements Are Four And Have Ever Been, And Will Ever Be For They Are The Elements Of Life, Of Poetry, And Of Perception, The Four Great Ones, The Four Roots, The First Four Of Fire And The Wet, Earth And The Wide Air Of The World. To Find The Other Many Elements, You Must Go To The Laboratory And Hunt Them Down. But The Four We Have Always With Us, They Are Our World. Or Rather, They Have Us With Them.

This Spring As It Comes Bursts Up In Bonfires Green, Wild Puffing Of Emerald Trees, And Flame-filled Bushes, Thorn-blossom Lifting In Wreaths Of Smoke Between Where The Wood Fumes Up And The Watery, Flickering Rushes. I Am Amazed At This Spring, This Conflagration Of Green Fires Lit On The Soil Of The Earth, This Blaze Of Growing, And Sparks That Puff In Wild Gyration, Faces Of People Streaming Across My Gaze.

Sleep Is A Hint Of Lovely Oblivion.

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

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 Christian Fear Of The Pagan Outlook Has Damaged The Whole Consciousness Of Man.

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.

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

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?

I Believe A Man Is Born First Unto Himself - For The Happy Developing Of Himself, While The World Is A Nursery, And The Pretty Things Are To Be Snatched For, And Pleasant Things Tasted; Some People Seem To Exist Thus Right To The End. But Most Are Born Again On Entering Manhood; Then They Are Born To Humanity, To A Consciousness Of All The Laughing, And The Never-ceasing Murmur Of Pain And Sorrow That Comes From The Terrible Multitudes Of Brothers.

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

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.

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.

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

Human Love, Human Trust, Are Always Perilous, Because They Break Down. The Greater The Love, The Greater The Trust, And The Greater The Peril, The Greater The Disaster. Because To Place Absolute Trust On Another Human Being Is In Itself A Disaster, Both Ways, Since Each Human Being Is A Ship That Must Sail Its Own Course, Even If It Go In Company With Another Ship.... And Yet, Love Is The Greatest Thing Between Human Beings.

Sometimes Snakes Can’t Slough. They Can’t Burst Their Old Skin. Then They Go Sick And Die Inside The Old Skin, And Nobody Ever Sees The New Pattern. It Needs A Real Desperate Recklessness To Burst Your Old Skin At Last. You Simply Don’t Care What Happens To You, If You Rip Yourself In Two, So Long As You Do Get Out.

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.

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

Falling In Love

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.

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.

Be Still When You Have Nothing To Say; When Genuine Passion Moves You, Say What You've Got To Say, And Say It Hot.

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

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.

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

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

The Near End Of The Street Was Rather Dark And Had Mostly Vegetable Shops. Abundance Of Vegetables - Piles Of White And Green Fennel, Like Celery, And Great Sheaves Of Young, Purplish, Sea-dust-coloured Artichokes . . . Long Strings Of Dried Figs, Mountains Of Big Oranges, Scarlet Large Peppers, A Large Slice Of Pumpkin, A Great Mass Of Colours And Vegetable Freshness. . . .

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

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.

The History Of The Cosmos Is The History Of The Struggle Of Becoming. When The Dim Flux Of Unformed Life Struggled, Convulsed Back And Forth Upon Itself, And Broke At Last Into Light And Dark Came Into Existence As Light, Came Into Existence As Cold Shadow Then Every Atom Of The Cosmos Trembled With Delight.

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.

Marriage And Deathless Friendship, Both Should Be Inviolable And Sacred: Two Great Creative Passions, Separate, Apart, But Complementary: The One Pivotal, The Other Adventurous: The One, Marriage, The Centre Of Human Life; And The Other, The Leap Ahead.

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

Creation Destroys As It Goes, Throws Down One Tree For The Rise Of Another. But Ideal Mankind Would Abolish Death, Multiply Itself Million Upon Million, Rear Up City Upon City, Save Every Parasite Alive, Until The Accumulation Of Mere Existence Is Swollen To A Horror.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Never Trust The Teller, Trust The Tale.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

For {she} Had Adopted The Standard Of The Young: What There Was In The Moment Was Everything. And Moments Followed One Another Without Necessarily Belonging To One Another.

We Ought To Dance With Rapture That We Should Be Alive And In The Flesh, And Part Of The Living, Incarnate Cosmos.

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.

When We Really Want To Go For Something Better, We Shall Smash The Old. Until Then, Any Sort Of Proposal, Or Making Proposals, Is No More Than A Tiresome Game For Self-important People.

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Carol P. Christ

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