Quotes from John Cowper Powys

She still required the dangerous, maddening nerve-quiver of vice to render existence bearable.

His neck as he stretched it upwards and backwards, felt like the neck of an antediluvian tortoise.

Had the whole human race, in the circles of some immense Colosseum gathered together to see Mrs. Cobbald executed it is certain that she would never have blinked an eyelid, or lapsed one hair's breadth from her fortitude.

It is not often given to human beings to be able to treat a fragment of time that can never return again with the intense and ritualistic concentration appropriate to a moment irretrievably slipping away into an everlasting impossibility of repetition.

Jerry had indeed something in him that went beyond Rabelaisianism, in that he not only could get an ecstasy of curious satisfaction from the most drab, ordinary, homely, realistic aspects of what might be called the excremental under-tides of existence but he could slough off his loathing for humanity in this contemplation and grow gay, child-like, guileless.

There was something about the man's abject humility that excited him in a way he could not have explained.

There was a general stir in the room and a craning forward of necks. The seasoned cronies of the Three Peewits had long ago discovered that the most delectable of all social delights was a quarrel that just stopped short of physical violence.

The reality is one thing; the name; with all is strange associations, is only an outward shell of such reality.

A semi-cirque of flying rooks, just seven in number, flapped with creaking wings across the top of the tower, making their way northwest towards Mark Moor. Little did they reck of the cracking of the skull of a man upon a patch of grass! As for a tiny earth beetle that was foraging for its insect prey just there, it scurried away from Tom's blood as if it had been a lake of brimstone.

Looking at her lying there, he thought what an appalling risk these lovers of 'happiness' take, when they bum their ships and trust their lives to the caprice of men.

With its green curtains and green carpet, with its green valences round its green arm-chairs, with its green tassels round its vase-bearing brackets, this spacious chamber, designed to pleasure their dead mother before either of them were born, was like a mausoleum to Ruth and Rodney.

Mary's thoughts were like a rain of bitterness and a dew of sweetness gathered in the hollows of a tree-root. A brimming over from them all would have escaped and vanished if she had tried to express them in any sort of speech.

It may be a good world,' he remarked sententiously, and 'and it may be a bad world, but it's the world; and us has got to handle 'un with eyes in our heads for landslides.

He had never been an artistic man. He had never been a fastidious man. He had got pleasure from smelling at dung-hills, from making water in his wife's garden, from snuffing up the sweet sweat of those he loved. He had no cruelty, no culture, no ambition, no breeding, no refinement, no curiosity, no conceit. He believed that there was a borderland of the miraculous round everything that existed and that everything that lived was holy.

The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.

Those were the only tears, that was the only smile, evoked from any human skull at the funeral of William Crow.

As he contemplated the loveliness of her figure, it struck him as infinitely pathetic that even beauty such as hers should be so dependent on the sexual humours of this man or that man for its adequate appreciation.

Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever vanishing. Never or Always.

Wolf took off his hat and stretched back his head, straining his neck as far as it would go, so that without relaxing the movement of walking, his upturned face might become horizontal. In this position he made a hideous grimace into infinity – a grimace directed at the Governing Power of the Universe. What

Casual amorists have indeed no notion of the world-deep sensuality of united physical labour. More than anything else this can give to a man and a girl a mysterious unity.

I don't understand half of what I read,' Christie began, speaking with extreme precision. 'All I know is that every one of those old books has its own atmosphere for me.

The language of trees is even more remote from human intelligence than the language of beasts or of birds. What to these lovers, for instance, would the singular syllables wuther-quotle-glug have signified?

All inventions,' he thought, 'come from man's brains. And man's soul can escape from them, and even while using them, treat them with contempt – treat them as if they were not! It

Up is infinite. Down is infinite. Pantheism, dualism, pluralism!