Quotes from John Cowper Powys

Wolf Solent was able to indulge in such an orgy of concentrated thought, that these three or four hours lengthened themselves out into something beyond all human measurement.

He wasn't an adventurer, he wasn't a rascally pilgarlic like one of those lean rogues lambasted in Rabelais who set their scurvy wits to deface, deflower, debauch and abduct, some sweet-blooded noble wench of an ancient breed.

Perhaps I've never known reality as other human beings know it,' he thought. 'My life has been industrious, monotonous, patient. I've carried my load like a camel. And I've been able to do this because it hasn't been my real life at all! My mythology has been my real life.' The

I don't care whether I make money. I don't care whether I get fame. I don't care whether I leave any work behind me when I die. All I want is certain sensations!' And

If there is some monstrous consciousness behind all life,' he thought angrily, 'it's responsible for all the horrors! Come

The grey sky had changed a little in character now. It was dimly interspersed with twinkling points of pale luminosity. Most of these points were so blurred and indistinct that it would have been hard to catch them again at a second glance in the same position in the vast ether. They were like nothing on earth; and to nothing on earth could they be compared. They were the stars, not of the night but of the twilight.

Thus did these two, the man from Wales and the man from Norfolk, enter the silent streets of the town of Glastonbury.

Well! my best to ye both and so says Phyllis from us both. I think I enjoy life more not less now that old age has stopped all my naughty little ways!    Yours as ever       Jack the Vampire & Corpse Lover.

And he recalled what Jason Otter had said about pity: how if you had pity and there was one miserable consciousness left in the universe, you had no right to be happy.

At the name Dekker there occurred that curious moral stiffening, that gathering together of relaxed social awareness, which always happens in England when an upper middle-class person enters the company of a group of lower middle-class persons.

It must have been after more than five minutes of this concentrated examination of the phenomenal shape which this strange growth on the horse's neck was gradually assuming, that the door-keeper suddenly leapt to his feet and began shouting: Bundy! Bundy! Bundy! come quick! Here's a horse that's going to have two heads! For God's sake come quick, Bundy, and look! It's going to have a man's head as well as its own! Quick! Quick! Bundy! come quick!

It is women's fatal susceptibility to passionate touch that hypnotises them into by far the greater number of their disasters; for under this touch-hypnosis the present transforms itself into the eternal, and their grand sex-defence, their consciousness of continuity, their awareness of the future as an integral portion of the present, is shattered and broken up.

No I've never read a line of de Sade and never shall. You see my own dominant overpowering maniacal vice was sadism and in Philadelphia (isn't that the right place for such a thing?) I used to borrow from a friend Sadistic Books in French (he had half a library of them!) and carry them off to my lodging where I wd. read them with my knees knocking together & all my pulses going it like mad in a prolonged cerebral fury of crazy unsatisfied satisfaction.

He had never been a man who attracted women, and he exaggerated their coldness towards him. Indeed in regard to the love of women he had a physical humility that was almost a mania. One of the strongest holds that Mary had over him was the simple fact that she, a sweet-looking, intellectual girl, could be in love with him at all! Secretly John regarded himself as the most unlovable human creature then living in Glastonbury.

Cordelia's face lent itself to windy and rainy weather.

I never have liked these here windy nights. These here nights be turble hummy and drummy to me pore head.

a broad-shouldered, rather fleshy individual, without any hat, whose grizzled head under that suspended light seemed to Sam the largest human head he had ever seen. It was the head of a hydrocephalic dwarf; but in other respects its owner was not dwarfish. In other respects its owner had the normally plump, rather unpleasantly plump figure of any well-to-do-man, whose back has never been bent nor his muscles hardened by the diurnal heroism of manual labour.

She felt quite friendly to her husband. He never struck her. He never abused her. He always gave her exactly the same sum of money every Saturday, whatever receipts the shop brought in. He didn't drink. He praised her cooking. But on the other hand—oh, how happy she always was when he was well out of the way and she was left alone!

What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life, and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature, which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause.

O it does fascinate me so, my new-old-new friend, to compare our lives. Of course I am really not an artist or a writer tho' I am a story-teller. I am a born orator and even now I long & long & long for The Platform as an old circus clown longs—or as we pretend he longs for the Ring! On the platform and there alone I am really myself & in my element & now I have been away from the platform for 20 years!

O I do so agree with you in Faith being the thing! But Henry (my dear) I can't I can't I can't and I won't (even if it is the old devil himself in me!) I can't agree with you about ' Love '. No no no no no no no no no no I am sick of love . It has been tried and it has failed. Jesus & Love have had their day.

Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding.

What was the use of having a father who could exorcise devils, who could give sleep to the tormented, if he could not heal his own child's wounded heart?

But this was only the first move, so to speak, in Sir Mort's intercourse with the cosmic multiplicity. The next thing this crazy owner of Roque must needs do was to pull himself out of the hole into which he had descended with such persistence and proceed to shoot himself through the air! On this air-borne quest he was careful to avoid every conceivable collision. He avoided the Moon and he avoided every planet. He avoided all the falling stars.