One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.
If a woman’s got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it’s thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!
The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.
That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.
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.
The goal is to know how not-to-know.
If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.
Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.
For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don’t say surgaries, or I’m done.
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.
Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.
Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.
A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection.
I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.
We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.
The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.
An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.