Quotes from Henry Williamson

The whole of the Universe is run by God, which is one vast Imagination, struggling against the almost irresistible brute forces of the cosmos.

There is a paradise, and all true artists work to the glory of its existence, even if they do not always believe with conventional or organised faith.

Pity acts through the imagination, the higher light of the world, and imagination arises from the world of things, as a rainbow from the sun.

Would the day come when scientists accepted that the ancients, who gave personalities to all natural phenomena, had divined the actual truth?

Life is big business, fornication, and death. Civilisation is ... the sterilising of truth ... Civilisation is world-citizenship and freedom from tradition, based on rootless eternal wandering in the mind that had nothing to lose and everything to gain including the whole world.

The grace of God is poetry...

A polluted stream, the bright spirit of water dead, is as sad as human death from murder. The soul of the murderer has been murdered first, we know; let the rivers sing...

poets have the spiritual fire within them; they are of the aetherial force, perhaps of the after-life. Who knows?

A man of genius truly matched in the companionship of mated love was the brightest being of creation, his genius was held in balance. Alone, he overworks, his mind runs upon its own circles, its own horrific convolutions

Such was life; everything passed away; the fields and woodlands of boyhood became built upon; streets and pavements and lamp posts arose where warblers and willow wrens had sung; nothing ever remained the same.

waves are the tears of Christ breaking on the stones of the world.

All things of the visible world are by their material forms archaic; whereas the Imagination is the spirit of evolution to higher forms.

When a bullet broke the store-house of the self, inside the skull, how could those myriads of photographs survive, or the personality that they made up? Why should they survive, what use were they to life?

Well, we're all in this together, boys. Each one of us must think, not of himself, but of his pals. We must stick by our pals, which means our country. Our country is our people, remember. It took a war like this one to bring that home to everybody.

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.

Education must be aimed at creating a wider imagination in the child, not at suppressing. The childs mind must be set free.