Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.
I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself…
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying.
Morning, noon & bloody night,Seven sodding days a week,I slave at filthy WORK, that mightBe done by any book-drunk freak.This goes on until I kick the bucket.FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT
So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago.
Uncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what I am.
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock….
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not.
Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Dear, I can’t write, it’s all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn’t true!
Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.
Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.
I am always trying to ‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word–the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriagesLasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.
I’d like to think…that people in pubs would talk about my poems
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.
Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful – great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Sex means nothing–just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It’s very strange how often strong feelings don’t seem to carry any message of action.
We should be carefulOf each other, we should be kindWhile there is still time
life is first boredom, then fear.whether or not we use it, it goes,and leaves what something hidden from us chose,and age, and then the only end of age.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are ‘The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation’)
What are days for?Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over.They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctor In their long coatsRunning over the fields.
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
I have wished you something None of the others would….
MaturityA stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,I shall have, till my single body grows Inaccurate, tired;Then I shall start to feel the backward pullTake over, sickening and masterful — Some say, de