Biographers From England

"In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time."

"His face was blue, on his fingers Flecks of green. 'This is my father', I thought."

"Love is God’s essence; Power but his attribute: therefore is his love greater than his power."

"Were Love exempt from the militations of Necessity, he were greater than God and the World."

"Sweet are the words of Love, sweeter his thoughts: Sweetest of all what Love nor says nor thinks."

"When Silence speaks for Love she has much to say."

"Thou canst not pray to God without praying to Love, but mayest pray to Love without praying to God."

"The three eldest children of Necessity: God, the World and love."

"If what we are all trying to do is to describe reality, an intuitive interpretation of actual experience, however loose the terms it employs, may bring us closer to it than the most rigorous linguistics and the severest logic. These last may leave so little room to manœuvre that they cannot capture any experience outside an accepted narrow pattern; and indeed they may operate (for philosophers do not live in a vacuum) to insist upon that pattern and to deny everything outside it."

"Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something suspiciously bovine about them."

"I suppose -- in the last resort -- you trust life -- or you don't. Well -- I don't. There's something malicious . . . corrupt . . . cruel . . . at the heart of it. We don't belong. We're a mistake."

"I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life."

"Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken -- every tick of the clock -- making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time."

"But the point is, now, at this moment, or at any moment, we're only a cross-section of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us -- the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream."

"Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch."

"It's silly for young men to announce themselves as new types of humanity. . .and then give you nothing but stale communism. Old H.G. Wells has more new ideas than the lot of them."

"I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself. That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love."

"It should be realised that men will take enormous risks rather than be bored. War has been used before now to prevent a bored populace from getting into mischief, at the expense of its rulers."

"Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators."

"Our great-grand-children, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious."

"We cannot go forward and build up this new world order, and this is our war aim, unless we begin to think differently...one must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. Property is the old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things in that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property; instead of thinking of a country as the home of a living society with the community itself as the first test."

"We English certainly do not like working for work's sake. There is nothing inside us that cries to be set going at an early hour and kept at it until a late hour. We have no private passion for being industrious."

"Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning."

"The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."

"In plain words; now that Britain has told the world she has the H-Bomb, she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject, in all circumstances, nuclear warfare. This is not pacifism. There is no suggestion here of abandoning the immediate defence of this island . . . No, what should be abandoned is the idea of deterrence-by-threat-of-retaliation. There is no real security in it, no decency in it, no faith, hope, nor charity in it."

"No matter what is willed by consciousness, that which belongs to the depths can only be restored in the depths: the numinous lies outside the power of collectives, cannot be subject to state decree, created by a resolution at an international conference, offered to all shareholders and employees by the board of Standard Oil or General Motors."

"I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces."

"It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins."

"In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points."

"Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness – when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be."

"Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries."

"To say that these men paid their shilling to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink."

"A man can afford to let himself go in a hen-house."

"She seemed to have had a sudden terrible glimpse of life as it really was, and was ready to weep at the thought of its strange dusty littleness."

"By the time they reached the hall, they were not so much friends as fellow-conspirators, for Youth, when it is exiled into the kingdoms of the old, at once turns itself into the strongest of secret societies."

"Mrs Bevison-Burr, the commanding woman, came next. Her subject was Unbelief. She referred to Unbelief as if it were a very obnoxious person who was in the habit of insulting her every morning and evening. Mrs Bevison-Burr commanded them to do all manner of things to Unbelief."

"Cathedral cities, market towns, ports forgotten by the sea, spas long out of fashion, all these can decay beautifully, and often their charm increases as the life ebbs out of them. Industrial towns, like steam-engines, are only even tolerable if they are in working order and puffing away."

"In this place, whether we call it Bruddersford or Pittford Falls, perfection is not to be found, neither in men nor in the lot they are offered, to say nothing of the tales we tell of them, these hints and guesses, words in the air and gesticulating shadows, these stumbling chronicles of a dream of life."

"He was quite capable of talking just as men talk in bad stories in popular magazines, and Miss Matfield had sometimes wondered whether it was because he had read a great many bad stories or because the stories were nearer the truth than one thought and were worked up, on the fringes of Empire, out of men like Major Ansdell."

"Your mother knows no more about organization than a — a prize rabbit."

"Miss Matfield liked her fiction to be full of jungles, coral reefs, plantations, lagoons, hibiscus flowers, the scent of vanilla, schooners on the wide Pacific, tropical nights. So long as the young man was first shown to her dressed in white and lounging on a veranda, while a noiseless brown figure brought him something long and cool to drink, she was ready to follow his love story to the end. If the story had no love in it but had the right exotic setting, she would read it, but she preferred a fairly strong love interest. She had not bad taste, and if the story was written for her by Joseph Conrad, so much the better; but she was ready to endure if not to delight in authors of a very different cut from Conrad if they would only give her the jungles and lagoons and coral reefs and mysterious brown faces. The worst story about Malaysia was preferable to the best story about Marylebone."

"She examined his face in that special detached way that all women seem to have at times, looking at your face as if it was not part of you, but something you were showing them, like a picture or a piece of china. Then she nodded wisely at it."

"[Y]ou've got to put up a show of being tough nowadays, especially if you're a girl, or else they'd all be walking over you with nailed boots. They do that anyhow, in the long run, if you're a woman."

"We know only too well that there are times when everything goes wrong, but, in our haste to make the worst of life, we are apt to forget that there are also times when everything goes right."

"There was some unknown reality, into which the mind retreated at these moments of smiling detachment, and from the standpoint of this unknown reality it seemed as if this real life, as we call it, was no more than a dream, only a few shades more solid and consistent than the dreams of the night.[…] What was this other and deeper reality? You never looked about in it, you only looked out of it, to smile at the tissue-paper drama of ordinary reality."

"But then we assume on our paper that nobody thinks. Which is all right. But where we're wrong—and of course I'm not really including myself but mean the top boys—is in thinking that our readers, dumb as they are, take us seriously."

"I've been up and down and round about," said the Commodore, "and I've seen a lot of religions at work. And I don't like them. With all due respect, padre. As a matter of fact I'm not thinking about the Church of England, which is something different, something intended to keep the English decent and fairly comfortable and not likely to go tearing off into religion and making nuisances of themselves—"

"… It's funny about England," he continued thoughtfully. "Once you're outside London, you seem to meet all kinds of people you never expect to meet, people you can't imagine meeting just from reading about England in the papers or most of the books. Not only odd characters but people who seem to belong to other periods. You never imagine, when you live a long way off, that all the other Englands—Victorian and Edwardian, for instance—still survive in certain people."

"In spite of its size and range, this is […] a personal essay. It is a Time-haunted man addressing himself chiefly to all those people he knows from experience to be also Time-haunted."

"The appalling difficulty of examining the Time problem seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that Time either changes into something else or quietly disappears from the examination room. Trying to keep it fixedly in view is like playing Wonderland croquet."