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.
Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.
A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches Where light pushes through; A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air. A dip to the water.
All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
You don’t want to love – your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn’t dictate to her.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
There’s always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate.
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 sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.
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.
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.
Homer was wrong in saying, “Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.
I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.
I am in love and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man.
At the back of my life’s horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.