105 Quotes by John Cowper Powys

It is the little thing, the unrehearsed gesture, the catch in the breath, the droop of the lip, the start of surprise, which really reveals. We may analyze ourselves in volumes and remain undiscovered; and then – by a yawn, a tilt of the head, a sob of exhaustion, a flash of hate - we are betrayed and unmasked forever.

The more one tries to analyze oneself the more one is conscious of amazing paradoxes and inconsistencies which lurk under the simplest surface.

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.

Mary's thoughts were like a rain of bitterness and a dew of sweetness gathered in the hollows of a tree-root. A brimming over from them all would have escaped and vanished if she had tried to express them in any sort of speech.

Life seemed entirely composed of weeping faces, old men sneaking up bedroom-stairs, tombstones with spittle trickling down, and black-edged calling-cards. He felt as if the First Cause of the Universe were a small, malignant grub, radiating a deadly blight in withering, centrifugal air-waves!

O I do so agree with you in Faith being the thing! But Henry (my dear) I can't I can't I can't and I won't (even if it is the old devil himself in me!) I can't agree with you about 'Love'. No no no no no no no no no no I am sick of love. It has been tried and it has failed. Jesus & Love have had their day.

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

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.

But this was only the first "move", so to speak, in Sir Mort's intercourse with the cosmic multiplicity. The next thing this crazy owner of Roque must needs do was to pull himself out of the hole into which he had descended with such persistence and proceed to shoot himself through the air! On this air-borne quest he was careful to avoid every conceivable collision. He avoided the Moon and he avoided every planet. He avoided all the falling stars.