Quotes from Mary Butts

Nature has a counterpart, a representation of every interior mood and obscure perception of man.

I blessed the power which has filled my life with poetry.

Art is the god you have not seen.

Frog or pearl, life hid something at the bottom of the cup.

Build a little fence of trust around today; Fill the space with loving deeds, and therein stay.

The truth which may not be told, is the truth which cannot be told.

Not till the end of the war will there be any time for art or love or magic again. Perhaps never again.

All night the earth and the heavens followed their usual arrangements. Stars passed: an immense tide hung over them. A silent sea raced back with the sun, its wave turn-over small, delicate and comfortless. The most glorious of all stars hung above the sun's threshold and went out. An hour later the sun governed the earth again, mist-chasing, flower-opening, bird-rousing, ghost-driving, spirit-shepherding back out the various gates of sleep.

Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.

He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.

She saw the skin pull under the driver's ears and knew that he was laughing.

the things you hate are only your body being knocked about by phenomena

Like men of his kind, at cross-purposes with their purpose, there could be nothing fortuitous that happened to him.

But of Paris it can be said that the right bank of the Seine belongs to the world, and the left bank to France.

For some days before, as well as for some nights, Vincent had observed a shadow about the quays. First because it had tried to sell him an obscene book, then because it tried to sell André an obscene book, then because it tried to sell everybody an obscene book.

Mais pour regner il faut se taire.

He turned his steel eyes at me. They hurt me, paralysed me, like the advancing lights of a car. I saw that his body was taut, all of it: also made of steel; that it only worked because it was at an intolerable tension, and that it was our sensation of that tension which had exhausted us, which could no longer be borne. He was the wrong spring which had been put into our machine, that had made Claude ill, George foolish, Boris an anxiety.