The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.
Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.
I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun.
If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.
Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.
Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
One should stick by one’s soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.
Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty is the flower.
The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey.
When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.
You feel free in Australia. There is great relief in the atmosphere – a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form. The Skies open above you and the areas open around you.
The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.
America exhausts the springs of one’s soul – I suppose that’s what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn’t grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.
If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
One should be religious in everything, have God, whatever God might be, present in everything.
The tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea.
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.
In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one’s friends – give me the country.
I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.
Why does the thin grey strand Floating up from the forgotten Cigarette between my fingers, Why does it trouble me?