105 Quotes by John Cowper Powys

Here under St. Michael's Tower sat these three figures, the lean shabby-genteel John, the hulking weather-bleached Sam, the black-coated Mr. Evans—all atheists towards the life-giving Sun-God, and all expanding now, in their thoughts, their feelings, their secretest hopes, because of the victory of vapour over light and of dampness over heat!

There was a general stir in the room and a craning forward of necks. The seasoned cronies of the Three Peewits had long ago discovered that the most delectable of all social delights was a quarrel that just stopped short of physical violence.

It is women's fatal susceptibility to passionate touch that hypnotises them into by far the greater number of their disasters; for under this touch-hypnosis the present transforms itself into the eternal, and their grand sex-defence, their consciousness of continuity, their awareness of the future as an integral portion of the present, is shattered and broken up.

Their wet cold faces, her shapeless nose and his grotesque hooked nose like the caricature-mask of a Roman soldier, their large, contorted, abnormal mouths, made, it might seem, more for anguished curses against God than for the sweet usage of lovers, were now pressed savagely against each other and, as they kissed, queer sounds came from both their throats, that were answered by the groanings of the tree and by the raindrops as the wind shook it.

Sexual gratitude is an emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediæval times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree.

What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life, and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature, which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause.

She felt quite friendly to her husband. He never struck her. He never abused her. He always gave her exactly the same sum of money every Saturday, whatever receipts the shop brought in. He didn't drink. He praised her cooking. But on the other hand—oh, how happy she always was when he was well out of the way and she was left alone!

He remembered to the end of his life what he felt at that moment, while the bone of his lower jaw met the bones of his knuckles pressed so hard against them. He felt absolutely alone – alone in an emptiness that was different from empty space. He did not pity himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself and waited – waited till whatever it was that enclosed him made some sign.

If Finn Toller had in his nervous organisation anything resembling what in popular parlance is called a "complex," such a "complex" consisted in the idea—almost, although not quite, a complete illusion—that people were continually wanting to bribe him to commit some murder.