Quotes from John Cowper Powys

Thought is a real thing. It is a live thing. It creates; it destroys; it begets; it projects its living offspring. Like certain forms of physical pain thoughts can take organic shapes. They can live and grow and generate, independently of the person in whose being they originated.

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

She [Mother Legge] was a vast, dusky, double-chinned mountain of a woman, with astute, little grey eyes; eyes that seemed rather to aim at not seeing what she wanted to avoid, than at seeing what she wanted to see.

And when I do say to she: 'Bain't Prior Bog of Bumset as good a church-lord as any old Saint?' she's answer to I is allus the same: 'Bog be Bog and Bumset be Bumset,' she do say, 'but when thee do pray to They Above, 'tis a very different style of Holy Man thee dost need for thee's pass to Salvation!

It is one of the psychological mistakes that the world makes, to assume that a man whose inclination drives him on to attempt seduction after seduction is a man of more ardent erotic passion than the more constant lover. The very reverse is the case.

Harry Stickles certainly did possess quite a number of peculiarities which would have been nerve-racking to any less well-constituted girl. These nasty little ways were made worse by the man's preposterous and incredible conceit. But Nancy had been given by Nature one supreme gift—wherein only one other person in Glastonbury rivalled her, and that was John Crow—the gift of forgetting.

It's absolutely impossible to talk of any woman to another woman without betraying the absent one. They must have blood! Every word you speak is a betrayal. They're not satisfied otherwise.

He became the terrible craving, he became the thing he was doing, he became the itch, the bite, the sting, the torment, the horror, he became the loathing that refused to stop doing what it loathed to do. He became the shapeless mouth that—

If Finn Toller had in his nervous organisation anything resembling what in popular parlance is called a complex, such a complex consisted in the idea—almost, although not quite, a complete illusion—that people were continually wanting to bribe him to commit some murder.

A bloated capitalist, like 'im, what do hexploit us poor dawgs, ought to be lickidated. It was Mr. Toller undoubtedly who was saying that ; and Red recognized his own oratorical expression, liquidated, the meaning of which, for the word had reached him from Bristol, had always puzzled him—though this had not prevented him from using it in his orations.

Young John had always dreaded certain particular mental images, and the worst of all among these was the image of something different from the male organ of generation being thrust into a female's womb. Another was the image of a fiery rod being thrust into a man's anus.

The day was one of those early Spring days that for some mysterious reason, very hard to analyse, are felt to be ill-omened and unpleasant. Something was certainly wrong with this day! All animal nerves felt it. All human nerves felt it. All living things were irritable, restless, disturbed; sick without being sick; sad without being sad; annoyed without any apparent cause for annoyance!

Do you ever feel,' he said, 'as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world – as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something that was very important?

As with all daring and successful men the tricks and devices of his subconscious nature were much more formidable than his rational schemes; and so by a sort of automatic protective instinct he kept them subconscious.

I'm sceptical about the reality of everything; even about the reality of Nature. Sometimes I think that there are several Natures ... several Universes, in fact ... one inside the other ... like Chinese boxes ...

Mr. Wollop had no quarrel with young men who had formulas for dodging responsibility, as long as they did their work in the shop. What he was conscious of was a certain puzzled contempt for anyone whose selfishness was so weak and shaky that it required a pious formula! Mr. Wollop needed no formula, pious or otherwise.

More delicately, more intricately fashioned than any grasses of the field, more subtle in texture than any seaweed of the sea, more thickly woven, and with a sort of intimate passionate patience, by the creative spirit within it, than any forest leaves or any lichen upon any tree trunk, this sacred moss of Somersetshire would remain as a perfectly satisfying symbol of life if all other vegetation were destroyed out of that country. There is a religious reticence in the nature of moss.

It did not take Lil-Umbra long with her fifteen-year-old legs and her slender figure to scamper down the quarter-of-a-mile avenue of over-arching elms that led due eastward from the Fortress of Roque, where she lived, to the ancient circle of Druidic stones that had come to be known as Castrum Sanctum.

Here under St. Michael's Tower sat these three figures, the lean shabby-genteel John, the hulking weather-bleached Sam, the black-coated Mr. Evans—all atheists towards the life-giving Sun-God, and all expanding now, in their thoughts, their feelings, their secretest hopes, because of the victory of vapour over light and of dampness over heat!

The evening of this perfect May Day was of a loveliness comparable with the hours that had preceded it. In certain subtle respects it was even more beautiful, just as in certain ways sleep is more beautiful than waking and death than life.

It is the little thing, the unrehearsed gesture, the catch in the breath, the droop of the lip, the start of surprise, which really reveals. We may analyze ourselves in volumes and remain undiscovered; and then – by a yawn, a tilt of the head, a sob of exhaustion, a flash of hate - we are betrayed and unmasked forever.

There are faces made for moonlight. There are faces created to respond to the wind. There are faces for sandy deserts, for lonely seashores, for solitary headlands, for misty dawns, for frosty midnights. Cordelia's face was made for rain.

Mr. Geard uncrossed his legs and purposely made his chair creak by shifting his position in it. One of the grand secrets of the man's magnetic power was that he forced himself to see nothing, to hear nothing, to think nothing of other people's affairs.

The more one tries to analyze oneself the more one is conscious of amazing paradoxes and inconsistencies which lurk under the simplest surface.