Quotes from Radclyffe Hall

If our love is a sin, then heaven must be full of such tender and selfless sinning as ours.

For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it's up to you to have the courage to make good.

Do try to remember this: even the world's not so black as it is painted -Valerie to Stephen (pg. 408)

I want you to be wise for your own sake, Stephen, because at the best life requires great wisdom. I want you to learn to make friends of your books; someday you may need them, because – ' He hesitated, 'because you mayn't find life at all easy, we none of us do, and books are good friends.

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation. ~ The Well of Loneliness, 1928

And her eyes filled with heavy, regretful tears, yet she did not quite know for what she was weeping. She only knew that some great sense of loss, some great sense of incompleteness possessed her, and she let the tears trickle down her face, wiping them off one by one with her finger.

Too late, too late, your love gave me life. Here am I the creature you made through your loving; by your passion you created the thing that I am. Who are you to deny me the right to love? But for you I need never have known existence.

And so blinded was she by those gleams of glory which the stars fling into the eyes of young lovers, that she saw perfection where none existed... p146

Give us also the right to our existence!

Life's not all beer and skittles

The eyes of the young are drawn to the stars, and the spirit of youth is seldom earth-bound.

The eye of youth is very observant. Youth has its moments of keen intuition, even normal youth -- but the intuition of those who stand mi-way between the sexes is so ruthless, so poignant, so deadly, as to be in the nature of an added scourge...

she took what she gave and she gave what she took, yes, but sometimes she gave just a little bit more – and that little bit more is the whole art of teaching, the whole art of living, in fact, and Miss Puddleton knew it.

But now, here she was, very wishful to pray, while not knowing how to explain her dilemma: 'I'm terribly unhappy, dear, unprobable God—' would not be a very propitious beginning.

Language is surely too small a vessel to contain these emotions of mind and body that have somehow awakened a response in the spirit.

In her they instinctively sensed an outlaw, and theirs was the task of policing nature.

this is only the beginning. Many die, many kill their bodies and souls, but they cannot kill the justice of God, even they cannot kill the eternal spirit. From their very degradation that spirit will rise up to demand of the world compassion and justice

as things turned out her choice had been happy, for seldom had two people loved more than they did; they loved with an ardour undiminished by time; as they ripened, so their love ripened with them.

Since this is a hard and sad truth for the telling; those whom nature has sacrificed to her ends--her mysterious ends that often lie hidden--are sometimes endowed with a vast will to loving, with an endless capacity for suffering also, which must go hand in hand with their love. p 146

Outrageous...that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own well-being and comfort.

There is something that mankind can never destroy in spite of an unreasoning will to destruction, and this is its own idealism, that integral part of its very being.

Writing, it was like a heavenly balm, it was like the flowing out of deep waters, it was like the lifting of a load from the spirit; it brought with it a sense of relief, of assuagement. One could say things in writing without feeling self-conscious, without feeling shy and ashamed and foolish -- one could even write of the days of young Nelson, smiling a very little as one did so.

Darling— I wonder if you realize how much I am counting on you're coming to England, how much it means to me— it means all the world, and indeed my body shall be all, all yours, as yours will be all, all mine, beloved. . . . And nothing will matter but just we two, we two longing loves at last come together.

The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. It said to itself: 'If seeing's believing, then I don't want to see -- if silence is golden, it is also, in this case, very expedient.