Quotes from John Cowper Powys

Washed, anointed, oiled, combed and curled, catered for and courted by lovely attendants, and his purpose crowned by a miraculous concatenation of convenient conditions, Bonaventura's instinctive reaction, when he heard this unusual wailing in the rafters of the roof above him and this long-drawn melancholy moaning in the corridors and landings and stairways and cellars beneath him, was simply to feel peevishly annoyed with the God he worshipped.

Mr. Geard was one of those men whose physical phlegm is so thick and deep that it requires a series of material shocks to rouse the full awareness in them of the taste and tang of life.

I know now what the Grail is. It is the desire of the generations mingling like water with the Blood of Christ, and caught in a fragment of Substance that is beyond Matter! It is a little nucleus of Eternity, dropped somehow from the outer spaces upon one particular spot!

All human minds, as they move about over the face of the earth, are in touch with a dark reservoir of our race's psychic garbage.

Thus, in the huge compensatory ebb and flow of great creative Nature, one tension of human feeling has the power of ejecting, or completely cancelling, another strain of feeling. For the emotional tension of a frustrated passion there is no better cure than to spend an hour or two in the presence of terrible bodily anguish.

To horses, dogs and cats, to birds in cages, to pigs in sties, to sheep in folds, to cattle in stalls—to them all he sang his song and danced his dance! When he was eating out-of-doors he would pay court to the nearest toad or frog or blind-worm. When he was sucking an orange before going to bed, he would make overtures to a spider.

Don't let me ever compete with anyone! If I'm a worm and no man, let me enjoy my life as a worm. Let me stop showing off to anyone... Let me live my life free from the opinions, good or bad, of all other people!

It is a thing of nerves , this brutish sting, this erotic obsession, of nerves and of the psyche, the soul, the self! The flesh is pathetically, beautifully, grotesquely innocent. It is in the nerves that all lecheries, all lusts, all passions lie...in the nerves and the imagination.

She lives so completely in books that I don't think she takes anything that happens in the real world very seriously. She

It is hard to be impersonal in a cosmos that runs to personality.

He had only one life. That was a basic and relentless fact. An eternity of 'something or other' lay behind him, and an equally obscure eternity of 'something or other' lay in front of him.

If no one were allowed to be thrilled by anything, as long as someone is made wretched by something, the life of the whole planet would perish!

Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.

Were all his better actions only so many Pharisaic sops thrown one by one into the mouth of a Cerberus of selfishness, monstrous and insane? Was

All that his tipsiness did was to make him five times more his natural self than in normal times. And Mr. Geard's natural self was a thing of mountainous potency.

But what I've got to do if I'm to keep any self-respect at all, he thought, rising stiffly from the bench, while his teeth chattered, is to accept my cowardice, take it all for granted, and think of myself as a nervous insignificant book-worm, who can't do anything but teach Latin and be petted by Miss Le Fleau!

It is perfectly possible for an energetic and powerfully galvanic will to win renown for its owner, while the deepest part of the personality which that towering will-power has to carry along with it, just as a swiftly driving chariot might have to carry in the belly of its body a writhing and squirming serpent, may be secretly twitching and quivering with all manner of maniacal distates and repugnances.

I do not find human nature either wicked or good, I find it driven forward by the same inevitable laws as the tides and the constellations

There are times in life, little lady, he said, when we can only listen to the ticking of the clock of fate and wait for what is destined to happen. This is one of those times.

The subtlest of all differences between human beings has to to with their attitude to themselves when they are thinking about themselves. Some caress themselves when they are alone and consciously dote on themselves, whereas others hold themselves apart from themselves with a certain despotic contempt for themselves—and this, too, even in the midst of their liveliest sensations.

So potent however is the concentrated love of the feminine heart, that although this man, sitting there above her, had just beheld—actually in the flesh—that elusive Mystery which was the cause of Glastonbury's being Glastonbury, it was the girl and not the man who dominated that moment, her exultation, and not his, that held the thunder-flash of that charged air.

Sylvanus was more than shy of himself. A hot rush of blood causing him a curious discomfort, would mount up to his head at the merest approach to physical self-consciousness. He had to forget himself, or he couldn't go on!

Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?