"I got the blues thinking of the future so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor."

"The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action."

"It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned exchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment."

"My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily."

"It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them."

"This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed."

"Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion."

"Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom."

"When along the pavement,Palpitating flames of life,People flicker around me,I forget my bereavement,The gap in the great constellation,The place where a star used to be."

"The final fact being that at the very bottom of his soul he was an outsider, and anti-social, and he accepted the fact inwardly, no matter how Bond-Streety he was on the outside. His isolation was a necessity to him; just as the appearance of conformity and mixing-in with the smart people was also a necessity."

"The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one."

"One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease."

"The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being."

"It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance."

"I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can helpand patience, and a certain difficult repentancelong difficult repentance, realization of life's mistake, and the freeing oneselffrom the endless repetition of the mistakewhich mankind at large has chosen to sanctify."

"And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall."

"For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack."

"The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept."

"Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing."

"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."

"She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon."

"Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little."

"We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority."

"Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base..."

"One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on."

"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

"For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another."

"Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life."

"Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar."

"The point is, what sort of a time can a man give a woman? Can he give her a damn good time, or can't he? If he can't he's no right to the woman..."

"Money is our madness, our vast collective madness."

"Of course , if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which..."

"The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write."

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it."

"But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly,' she protested.'I don't want to fuck you at all.'Lady Chatterly's Lover."

"And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don't."

"It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral."

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment."

"She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies."

"She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte."

"People always make war when they say they love peace."

"I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self."

"The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection."

"There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys out warm being."

"That's the place to get to-nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world's somewheres, into our own nowhere."

"Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."

"Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over."

"There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see."

"The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man."

"Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to."