When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?”For fun?”Fun!’ He pounced on the word. ‘Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.””I think you may be.”I smiled dubiously. “Thank you.””It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
She’s always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.’ ‘Prose and pudding?”I don’t expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need – an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
…Russia itself having turned to socialist realism – no-man’s-land between surrealism and communism,…
I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can’t you understand? I don’t think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating.
I’m only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.
The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.
I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.
The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.
These question-boundaries …are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.
Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.
Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination.
Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.
I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive’s.
I want to tell you what’s really happened.””Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.”And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.
In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.
For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.
The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
He said, one has to learn that painting well – in the academic and technical sense – comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you’ve got that ability. So have thousands.
A word (…) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (…) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.
She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.’You’re being very silent.”That’s how men cry.
Wolves don’t hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.
A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless… speciesless.
He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.
I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.
Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.
If there is a God he’s a great loathsome spider in the darkness.
The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.
You’re not me. You can’t feel like I feel.””I can feel.””No you can’t. You just choose not to feel or something and everything’s fine.””It’s not fine. It’s just not so bad.
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you.
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn’t mind at all. It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.
And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.
It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often. It’s a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.
That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.
Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.
…and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant’s Woman
So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.
Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.
People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
He said, it’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone — had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.
and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring
Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
I left a pause. ‘You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.’ ‘I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.
But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror
Labor is a man crowning glory.””Not this man’s.””I quote Marx”I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough.”I quote blisters.
Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don’t care.
What you love is your own love. It’s not love, it’s selfishness. It’s not me you think of, but what you feel about me.
A total stranger, and one not of one’s sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.
Now I understand why you grow so many flowers.”She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, “To cover the stink of sulphur.
It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.
If I could only escape, if I could only escape… he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
In essence the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.
Men love war because it allows them to look serious because it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them.
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
There are only two races on this planet – the intelligent and the stupid.
We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.