Great Throughts Treasury

"Heads in the Women's Ward: On pillow after pillow lies the wild white hair and staring eyes; jaws stand open; necks are stretched with every tendon sharply sketched; a bearded mouth talks silently to someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled at lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come death's terror and delirium."

"Here is an unfenced existence."

"Here silence stands like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, luminously-peopled air ascends; and past the poppies bluish neutral distance ends the land suddenly beyond a beach of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach."

"Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go as if to win them back."

"How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words.)"

"How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really."

"I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt."

"I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation."

"I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife."

"I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can?t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why should I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, Negro-homosexual rubbish, or dope-take nervous-breakdown rubbish? I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren?t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in the little autumnal moments of vision, that the so called ?big? experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour."

"I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation')"

"I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action."

"I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me."

"I have wished you something none of the others would."

"I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals."

"I really am going to meet Forster: I thought I shouldn't, but apparently the old boy E.M.F. is saying with remembered my name and I am bid to John Hewitt's at 8 tomorrow. Shall I ask him if he's a homo? It's the only thing I really want to know about him, you see. I don't even care why he packed up writing."

"I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others and myself."

"I sit in my room like Miss Havisham, about whom I have been reading this week. Better the Dickens you know than the Dickens you don't know - on the whole I enjoyed it. But I should like to say something about this 'irrepressible vitality', this 'throwing a fresh handful of characters on the fire when it burns low', in fact the whole Dickens method - it strikes me as being less ebullient, creative, vital, than hectic, nervy, panic-stricken. If he were a person I should say 'You don't have to entertain me, you know. I'm quite happy just sitting here.' This jerking of your attention, with queer names, queer characters, aggressive rhythms, piling on adjectives - seems to me to betray basic insecurity in his relation with the reader. How serenely Trollope, for instance, compares. I say in all seriousness that, say what you like about Dickens as an entertainer, he cannot be considered as a real writer at all; not a real novelist. His is the garish gaslit melodramatic barn (writing that phrase makes me wonder if I'm right!) where the yokels gape: outside is the calm measureless world, where the characters of Eliot, Trollope, Austen, Hardy (most of them) and Lawrence (some of them) have their being."

"I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!"

"I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve."

"I would not dare console you if I could. What can be said, except that suffering is exact, but where desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?"

"I think? someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex ? its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like rugby football: either you like kicking and being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football."

"I was sleeping, and you woke me to walk on the chilled shore of a night with no memory, till your voice forsook my ear till your two hands withdrew and I was empty of tears, on the edge of a bricked and streeted sea and a cold hill of stars."

"If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over and until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first."

"I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day."

"In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange there was one constant good: she did not change."

"It becomes still more difficult to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind."

"In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing."

"I'd like to think... that people in pubs would talk about my poems"

"If I looked into your face expecting a word or a laugh on the old conditions, it would not be a friend who met my eye."

"Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd."

"Life is slow dying."

"Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself."

"Men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz and tell where it may still be found."

"It's funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive and intelligent and always one down and all the rest of it: then at thirty one finds one is a great clumping brute, incapable of appreciating anything finer than a kiss or a kick, roaring our one's hypocrisies at the top of one's voice, thick skinned as a rhino. At least I do."

"It never worked for me. Something to do with violence a long way back, and wrong rewards, and arrogant eternity."

"Last year is dead, they seem to say,/ Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

"Morning, noon and bloody night, seven sodding days a week, I slave at filthy WORK, that might be done by any book-drunk freak. This goes on until I kick the bucket. FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT."

"Most things may never happen: this one will."

"Mother's electric blanket broke, and I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long."

"Much better stay in company! To love you must have someone else, giving requires a legatee, good neighbors need whole parishfuls of folk to do it on - in short, our virtues are all social; if, deprived of solitude, you chafe, it's clear you're not the virtuous sort."

"Next, Please. Always too eager for the future, we pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day till then we say, watching from a bluff the tiny, clear sparkling armada of promises draw near. How slow they are! And how much time they waste, refusing to make haste! Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks of disappointment, for, though nothing balks each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked, each rope distinct, flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits arching our way, it never anchors; it's no sooner present than it turns to past. Right to the last wWe think each one will heave to and unload all good into our lives, all we are owed for waiting so devoutly and so long. But we are wrong: only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence. In her wake no waters breed or break."

"Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, and little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut for Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff up at the holy end; the small neat organ; and a tense, musty, unignorable silence, brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence. Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new - Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce 'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, and always end much at a loss like this, wondering what to look for; wondering, too, when churches will fall completely out of use what we shall turn them into, if we shall keep a few cathedrals chronically on show, their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, and let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? Or, after dark, will dubious women come to make their children touch a particular stone; pick simples for a cancer; or on some advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort will go on in games, in riddles, seemingly at random; but superstition, like belief, must die, and what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, a shape less recognizable each week, a purpose more obscure. I wonder who will be the last, the very last, to seek this place for what it was; one of the crew that tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were? Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh? Or will he be my representative, bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground through suburb scrub because it held unspilt so long and equably what since is found only in separation - marriage, and birth, and death, and thoughts of these - for which was built this special shell? For, though I've no idea what this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, it pleases me to stand in silence here; a serious house on serious earth it is, in whose blent air all our compulsions meet, are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, since someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious, and gravitating with it to this ground, which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, if only that so many dead lie round."

"Living toys are something novel, but it soon wears off somehow."

"Love, we must part now: do not let it be calamitous and bitter. In the past there has been too much moonlight and self-pity: let us have done with it: for now at last never has sun more boldly paced the sky, never were hearts more eager to be free, to kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I no longer hold them; we are husks, that see the grain going forward to a different use. There is regret. Always, there is regret. But it is better that our lives unloose, as two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light, break from an estuary with their courses set, and waving part, and waving drop from sight."

"Maturity: A stationary sense . . . as, I suppose, I shall have, till my single body grows inaccurate, tired; then I shall start to feel the backward pull take over, sickening and masterful ? some say, desired. And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink, as if at pain; for it is pain, to think this pantomime of compensating act and counter-act, defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact, my ablest time."

"One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the damn day as we do ourselves."

"Only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence. In her wake no waters breed or break."

"Our almost-instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love."

"Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write."