Quotes from John Cowper Powys

Time was ," it said. "Time is ," it said. "And time will —"    But the burning meteor then fell upon it, and neither it nor what destroyed it was ever seen again.

Below the surface of the most civilised human beings, the hunger-lust darts and snaps like a fish, snatches and rends like a bird, growls like a wolf, snarls like a panther, buzzes like a hornet, bleats like a sheep and stamps like a bull; and there is nothing so aggravating to hungry stomachs as the sight of dirty plates pushed away from satisfied rival stomachs.

We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!

Children's aesthetic sense is a deep half-animal feeling and when it is outraged it leaves a wound behind it that never quite heals up.

Wolf's wits, moving now, in spite of the fumes of smoke and alcohol, with restored clarity, achieved a momentous orientation of many obscure matters.

It is that cricket field that, in all the sharp and bitter moments of life as they come to me now, gives me a sense of wholesome proportion: 'At least I am not playing cricket!

It was characteristic of the vein of unhappy sluggishness and inertness in him that only when impressions had subsided into the remote past could he be thrilled by them. The reality of the present seemed always weighted with something hurting.

The day was warm; but the fact that the sky was covered with a filmy veil of grey clouds gave to the vast plain before him the appearance of a landscape whose dominant characteristic consisted in a patient effacement of all emphatic or outstanding qualities. The green of the meadows was a shy, watery green. The verdure of the elm trees was a sombre, blackish monotony. The yellow of the stubble land was a whitish-yellow, pallid and lustreless.

He remembered to the end of his life what he felt at that moment, while the bone of his lower jaw met the bones of his knuckles pressed so hard against them. He felt absolutely alone – alone in an emptiness that was different from empty space. He did not pity himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself and waited – waited till whatever it was that enclosed him made some sign.

Damn these indecisions! This accursed difficulty of deciding, of deciding anything at all, seemed to have grown into an obsession with him. To have to decide... that was the worst misery on earth!

My dear Henry    I've just written to you over the air, but this will have to go by land & sea, never mind! Our peculiar link as two lost re-incarnated Atlanteans meeting again after escaping from the flood in opposite directions will not be broken either by air travel or land & sea travel!

And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that shook the foundations of his nature.

Their wet cold faces, her shapeless nose and his grotesque hooked nose like the caricature-mask of a Roman soldier, their large, contorted, abnormal mouths, made, it might seem, more for anguished curses against God than for the sweet usage of lovers, were now pressed savagely against each other and, as they kissed, queer sounds came from both their throats, that were answered by the groanings of the tree and by the raindrops as the wind shook it.

Sexual gratitude is an emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediæval times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree.

Oh, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care! I don't care what happens, as long as everything doesn't go on repeating itself!

Reason? Justice? The forces that victimized and paralysed him now were those that had created the world. Who was he to contend against them?

The mind of a teacher of Latin and a reader of Greek is a queer thing. No sooner had Magnus in his justifiable indignation at her teasing ways imagined himself ravishing Curly by force in her own maiden bed, than such a blind passion of pure love for her swept over him that the blood rushed to his head and he squeezed his bony hands together.

Suddenly, with a cynical frankness, he began comparing his feelings for these two girls. 'The truth is,' he said to himself, 'I love them both! I love Gerda because she's so simple, and because I've slept with her all these months ; and I love Christie because she's so subtle, and because I've never slept with her!

It may well be that what gives to the wind along that Wessex coast its indescribable mixture of vague sorrow and wild obscure joy comes from its passing, on its unpredictable path, the floating hair of so many love-lorn maidens and the wild-tossed beards of so many desolate old men.

It is an old and bitter experience of the human race that when once a gulf-stream of a particular evil has got started, it is always being whipped forward by some new little breeze, or enlarged by some new little stream emptying itself into it. A magnetic power, it seems, in such a gulf-stream of evil, attracts these casual and accidental encouragements.

It's as if we were both digging into each other's soul to find a self that was put there before we were born.

It was as if cowslips and cow-droppings mingled with sea-horses and cowry-shells.

Mr. Gaul took off his spectacles, a gesture of his which always accompanied the reception of anything startling. But he only twisted them in his hands and replaced them carefully. Had the event been more personally arresting he would have cleaned them with his coat-sleeve. Confronted by a shipwreck he might even have rubbed them against his trousers.

Being a philosopher, rather than a neophyte in sanctity, Mr. Gaul did not feel it at all incumbent upon him to refrain from contemplating Perdita's legs.