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.
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
I am infinitely strange to myself.
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
Between skin and skin, there is only light.
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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.
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.
You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.
The world began in hazard and will end in it.
There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.
There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.
They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.
That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.
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.
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now,therefore I am happy' , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.
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.
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.
The best wines take the longest to mature.
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.
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.
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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.
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.
Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.
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.
He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.
We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.
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.
But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.
...there are times when silence is a poem.
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.
The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.
It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
He is the same, but everything is different.
You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.
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.
Oh,clever... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?
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.
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.
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.
Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
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.
Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.
He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.
Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? What are you drinking? The water or the wave?
No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.
I needed a new mystery.
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.
I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.
The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unedurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken.
A thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.
A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature.
And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.
Between skin and skin there is only light. And there was my poetry.
For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.
You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.
How I hate ignorance! Caliban’s ignorance, my ignorance, the world’s ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.
