- Art should be artless, not heartless.
- How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds!
- There is something about a swarm that is damaging to the pride of its individual members.
- Other people's faults can be fascinating. One's own are dreary.
- This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.
- The immemorial game of love: no less a game for being grave. No less grave for being wild. Grave as a great green sky. Grave as a surgeon's knife.
- A law as old as the laws of his home, the law of flesh and blood. The law of longing. The law of change. The law of youth. The law that separates the generations, that draws the child from his mother, the boy from his father, the youth from both. And it was the law of quest. The law that few obey for lack of valour. The craving of the young for the unknown and all that lies beyond the tenuous skyline.
- A ritual, more compelling than ever devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forebears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood. The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter 'Weep'. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak 'Rejoice!' O little revolution in great shades!
- The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity.
- There is no calm for those who are uprooted. They are wanderers, homesick and defiant. Love itself is helpless to heal them though the dust rises with every footfall - drifts down the corridors - settles on branch or cornice - each breath an inhalation from the past so that the lungs, like a miner's, are dark with bygone times. Whatever they eat, whatever they drink, is never the bread of home or the corn of their own valleys. It is never the wine of their own vineyards. It is a foreign brew.
- In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.
- I am the wilderness lost in man.
- As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.
- Swung out of sunlight into cosmic shade / Come what come may the imagination's heart / Is constellation high and can't be weighed. / Nor greed nor fear can tear our faith apart / When every heart-beat hammers out the proof / That life itself is miracle enough.
- When Aunty Flo / Became a Crow / She had a bed put in a tree / And there she lay / And read all day / Of ornithology.
- If trees gushed blood when they were felled / By meddling man, and crimson welled / From every gash his axe can give / Would he forbear and let them live?
- To live at all is miracle enough/ The doom of nations is another thing/ Here in my hammering blood-pulse is my proof.
- The vastest things are those we may not learn. We are not taught to die, nor to be born, nor how to burn with love. How pitiful is our enforced return to those small things we are the masters.
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