105 Quotes by John Cowper Powys

What I've got...to say, Missus, be for Mr. Robinson's ear alone. Please allow me, Missus, for all that us poor folks have got left"—he stopped and threw a very sinister leer at Red—"be what be put in our minds by they as be book-larned and glib of tongue, like this clever Mister here, who is foreman of his Worship's. Us poor dogs hasn't got anything left in the world, us hasn't, except they nice, little thoughties, they pretty thoughties, what clever ones, like Mister here, do put into we.

A bloated capitalist, like 'im, what do hexploit us poor dawgs, ought to be lickidated." It was Mr. Toller undoubtedly who was saying that; and Red recognized his own oratorical expression, "liquidated," the meaning of which, for the word had reached him from Bristol, had always puzzled him—though this had not prevented him from using it in his orations.

So potent however is the concentrated love of the feminine heart, that although this man, sitting there above her, had just beheld—actually in the flesh—that elusive Mystery which was the cause of Glastonbury's being Glastonbury, it was the girl and not the man who dominated that moment, her exultation, and not his, that held the thunder-flash of that charged air.

Thus, in the huge compensatory ebb and flow of great creative Nature, one tension of human feeling has the power of ejecting, or completely cancelling, another strain of feeling. For the emotional tension of a frustrated passion there is no better cure than to spend an hour or two in the presence of terrible bodily anguish.

We have at any rate one advantage over Time and Space. We think them whereas it is extremely doubtful whether they think us!

Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding.

   "Time was," it said. "Time is," it said. "And time will—"   But the burning meteor then fell upon it, and neither it nor what destroyed it was ever seen again.

It is not often given to human beings to be able to treat a fragment of time that can never return again with the intense and ritualistic concentration appropriate to a moment irretrievably slipping away into an everlasting impossibility of repetition.

The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.