How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.
All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
It’s better to be born lucky than rich. If you’re rich, you may lose your money, but if you’re born lucky, you will always have more money.
A woman needn’t be dragged down by her functions.
Why is a door-knob deader than anything else?
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one’s whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.
You’ve got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself.
I cannot get any sense of an enemy – only of a disaster.
Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.
Nothing is as bad as a marriage that’s a hopeless failure.
All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.
Men and women aren’t really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.
The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.
Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.
We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ’em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.
The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.
Don’t talk to me any more about poetry for months – unless it is other men’s work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I’m fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.
Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.