A Glastonbury Romance Quotes

“There occurred within a causal radius of Brandon Station one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause. In the soul of the great blazing sun there were complicated superhuman vibrations [connected] ... with the feelings of a few intellectual sages who had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces. Roaring, cresting, heaving, gathering, mounting, advancing, receding, the enormous fire-thoughts of this huge luminary surged relentlessly to and fro, evoking a turbulent aura of psychic activity.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that drowns, in its full-blossomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their sub-human voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“There are only two mortal sins in the world; one of these is to be cruel and the other is to possess, and they are both destructive of happiness.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Below the surface of the most civilised human beings, the hunger-lust darts and snaps like a fish, snatches and rends like a bird, growls like a wolf, snarls like a panther, buzzes like a hornet, bleats like a sheep and stamps like a bull; and there is nothing so aggravating to hungry stomachs as the sight of dirty plates pushed away from satisfied rival stomachs.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“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.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Different from all other essences in the world the smell of primroses has a sweetness that is faint and tremulous, and yet possesses a sort of tragic intensity. There exists in this flower, its soft petals, its cool, crinkled leaves, its pinkish stalk that breaks at a touch, something which seems able to pour its whole self into the scent it flings on the air. Other flowers have petals that are fragrant. The primrose has something more than that. The primrose throws its very life into this essence of itself which travels upon the air.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding. Every one of them contains jagged precipices, splintered rock-peaks, ghastly crevasses, smouldering volcanoes, scorched and scorching deserts, blistering sands, evil dungeons from behind whose barred windows mad and terrible faces peer out. Every pair of human eyes is a custom-house gate into a completely foreign port; a port whose palaces and slums, whose insane asylums and hospitals, whose market-places and sacred shrines represent the terrifying and the menacing as well as the promising and the pleasure-giving! But when once any small group of persons has been together for any reasonable length of time the official warders of these custom-house gates are withdrawn. Each individual in such a group feels he can wander freely through the purlieus of these other enclosed fortresses! He does not necessarily move a step. The point is that the gates into the unknown streets no longer bristle with bayonets, are no longer thronged with “dreadful faces” and “fiery arms.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“as would keep him Alive and Howling for a Million Years!”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“I read a Russian book once, Barter, by that man whose name begins with D, and a character there says he believes in God but rejects God's World. Now I feel just the opposite! I think the whole of God's World is infinitely to be pitied—tortured and torturers alike—but I think that God Himself, the great Living God, responsible for it all, the powerful Creator who deliberately gave such reptiles, such sharks, such hyænas, such jackals as we are, this accursed gift of Free Will, ought to have such a Cancer”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Thought is a real thing. It is a live thing. It creates; it destroys; it begets; it projects its living offspring. Like certain forms of physical pain thoughts can take organic shapes. They can live and grow and generate, independently of the person in whose being they originated.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever vanishing. Never or Always.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“It is an old and bitter experience of the human race that when once a gulf-stream of a particular evil has got started, it is always being whipped forward by some new little breeze, or enlarged by some new little stream emptying itself into it. A magnetic power, it seems, in such a gulf-stream of evil, attracts these casual and accidental encouragements.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“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.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“All human minds, as they move about over the face of the earth, are in touch with a dark reservoir of our race's psychic garbage.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Cordelia's face lent itself to windy and rainy weather.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“More delicately, more intricately fashioned than any grasses of the field, more subtle in texture than any seaweed of the sea, more thickly woven, and with a sort of intimate passionate patience, by the creative spirit within it, than any forest leaves or any lichen upon any tree trunk, this sacred moss of Somersetshire would remain as a perfectly satisfying symbol of life if all other vegetation were destroyed out of that country. There is a religious reticence in the nature of moss.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that shook the foundations of his nature.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“The grey sky had changed a little in character now. It was dimly interspersed with twinkling points of pale luminosity. Most of these points were so blurred and indistinct that it would have been hard to catch them again at a second glance in the same position in the vast ether. They were like nothing on earth; and to nothing on earth could they be compared. They were the stars, not of the night but of the twilight.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“A limit there must be," thought Sam, "to the sympathy one soul can give to other souls—or all would perish.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Sam's under-mind came to the conclusion that the most serious question of all questions was at what point, if life was to go on with any degree of endurance, is it necessary to harden our hearts and cease to think of the pain of others?”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Any lie," he shouted, "I tell you, any lie as long as a multitude of souls believes it and presses that belief to the cracking point, creates new life, while the slavery of what is called truth drags us down to death and to the dead! Lies, magic, illusion—these are names we give to the ripples on the water of our experience when the Spirit of Life blows upon it.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Their feelings! When, at this very moment in China, in India, in New York, in Berlin, in Vienna—Good God! . . . their feelings! When, at this moment, if all the pain in the world caused by this accursed personal life, by this accursed individual life were to rise up in one terrific cry . . . it would ——”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“it seemed to her that this masculine desire to create some "important" future was one of the dreariest mockeries of human values that existed in the world. "Keep us alive. Give us food. Give us love. Give us children. But take your 'important' Communisms and Capitalisms from around our waists and from about our necks!”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“How lucky I am to be happy when God delights to make even trees suffer!”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“In all minds there are abominable thoughts. We are all potential murderers. But something—some feeling, some motion of the will, some scruple, some principle—intervenes, and we cannot act what we think!”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“It was one of those moments when the pre-birth stirrings of a ghastly idea are huddled and swaddled in an ominous silence. Certain thoughts, that have been long nurtured in deep half-conscious brooding, manifest themselves, when they finally emerge into the light, with a horrid tangibility that is like the impact of something physically shocking. And into this warm,”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“But if everyone waited," he said to himself, "to snatch their hour, till not a cry, a groan, a moan, could be heard in the whole world, who would ever be happy?" There!”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“If only he knew that there were a God, who for one second had an ear open, what things he would pour into that gaping, hairy, stupid orifice. In the old days their gods made them sacrifice their enemies to propitiate the great pain-engine.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“He resumed his sentry's march, but his mind was beating now against the blood-stained wedge of the world's pain, and he could not give up himself with absolute assent to his good hour.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance