Publicity! publicity! was the persistent demand. To meet the demand, small papers, owned and edited by women, sprang up all over t...he land, and like Jonah's gourd, perished in a night.... No use waiting to learn to put two consecutive sentences together in any connected form, or for an idea or the power of expressing it. One woman was printing her productions, and why should not all the rest do likewise? They had so long followed some leader like a flock of sheep, that now they would rush through the first gap into newspaperdom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works o...f imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilliser. It is important to recognise that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed colour on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, ma...king a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I find that with me low spirits and feeble health come and go together. The last two or three months I have had frequent attacks o...f the blues. They generally are upon me or within me when I am somewhat out of order in bowels, throat, or head.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is not precious, a thing to be cherished. The soul and the mind are the instruments God gives us for our use and half of us d...on't begin to use them. We put Life and Health on two little pedestals and spend most of our time performing acts of devotion before them. Instead of using them as a carpenter his tools, as a helmsman the rudder, to hammer or steer our way to victory, we turn ourselves into Vestal Virgins with nothing on the face of the earth to do but to feed the feeble flames of our comfort. Life is no craven thing, lurking coward-like in a corner. It is big, broad, splendid in opportunity. It is to be used, not cherished. It is to be spent, not saved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The soldier here, as everywhere in Canada, appeared to be put forward, and by his best foot. They were in the proportion of the so...ldiers to the laborers in an African ant-hill.... On every prominent ledge you could see England's hands holding the Canadas, and I judged from the redness of her knuckles that she would soon have to let go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoo...n.... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get th...e two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adultery is the vice of equivocation. It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together l...ike jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you've made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors--neutral gray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »