Quotes from Kay Boyle

There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.

whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing.

Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul

Words are shallow troughs for the deep water of the mind and it is only the fierce, the living, the simple, the clear, the angry mind which can overflow the troughs and go out over the mud, and over the grass, bearing the light of the sun on it like an angry shield.

There is no way for even the most honest among us to look into memory's dreamy, evasive eyes and know she can be persuaded not to lie, not to betray.

It takes courage to say things differently: Caution and cowardice dictate the use of the cliché.

The puritanical conscience is the coldest and cruelest of all the self-flagellating consciences to bear, for it stamps the sweet abandon out of life entirely. .... The puritanical conscience, with its little grey bonnet tied under its chin....

That threshold lying at the entrance to each man's and woman's life, I knew without equivocation now, must be recognized and genuflected before.

our landlord and landlady. Their house, just outside the town, was quite a little chateau, and the evil that dwelt within its highly polished salons, that reclined on its lace-covered beds, and was coiled deep in the stuffing of its exquisitely upholstered chairs and sofas, was enough to make the blood turn icy in the veins.

I heard the military bands playing with false and terrible cheer in the streets as the recruits went off to war [WW1]. I had beat the bed with my fists then, and cried tears of rage that young men must march off to this artful ad calculated accompaniment to places where wagon roads would be laid across their bones.

The decision to speak out is the vocation and lifelong peril by which the intellectual must live.