John Cowper Powys Quotes

So evil, so cruel, so base, O Lord, are the generations of men, why dost Thou seek to redeem them with Thy suffering? Why dost Thou not cause a flood to arise — as at the beginning — and drown forever their itching, biting, stinging, scorpion-lusts in smooth, deep fathoms of oblivious water?

My dear Henry
I've just written to you over the air, but this will have to go by land & sea, never mind! Our peculiar link as two lost re-incarnated Atlanteans meeting again after escaping from the flood in opposite directions will not be broken either by air travel or land & sea travel!

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.

Instead of pausing in our multifarious activities, instead of putting aside our laborious quests, we are being perpetually fooled into thinking that happiness is to be reached in the same way as pleasure is, by the possession of something.

The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.

"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."

Children's aesthetic sense is a deep half-animal feeling and when it is outraged it leaves a wound behind it that never quite heals up.

Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question.

If by the time we're sixty we haven't learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven't grown old to much purpose.

Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.

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.

She [Mother Legge] was a vast, dusky, double-chinned mountain of a woman, with astute, little grey eyes; eyes that seemed rather to aim at not seeing what she wanted to avoid, than at seeing what she wanted to see.

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.

One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

The influence of friendship upon culture differs from that of love, in that it assumes the basic idiosyncrasies of personal taste to be unalterable. Love, in spite of all rational knowledge to the contrary, is always in the mood of believing in miracles.