Caitlin Thomas
If happiness comes at all: which is by no means prearranged; it comes by the way, while you are seeking for something else. Something outside yourself, beyond yourself: in a brief absorption of self-forgetfulness.Collection: Happiness
Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.Collection: Sex
There is a brotherliness about a drinking person, which is coldly lacking in the straight and narrow enemies of drink; the difference between the two is more marked than nationality or belief: it is an opposite species altogether. It is against the unwritten laws of congeniality for them to mix. For me, a man who does not drink is distinctly indecent.Collection: Drinking
My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow.Collection: Cutting
One should never go back to a place one has loved; for, however, rough the going forward is, it is better than the snuffing out-of-love return.Collection: Return
there is this malign curse laid on dipsomaniacs. That they must absolutely have a drink: in order to feel strong enough to stop drinking.Collection: Strong
there is no gaiety as gay as the gaiety of grief.Collection: Grief
So it is useless to evade reality, because it only makes it more virulent in the end. But instead, look steadfastly into the slit, pin-pointed, malignant eyes of reality: as an old-hand trainer dominates his wild beasts. Take it by the scruff of the neck, and shake the evil intent out of it; till it rattles out harmlessly, like gall bladder stones, fossilized on the floor.Collection: Eye
resignation, perhaps the most stifling word in the language.Collection: Language
When the desire is on for one particular person, nobody else will do.Collection: Desire
A lot of warm vulgarity is incomparably preferable to a little bit of pinched nicenessCollection: Vulgarity Is
Between threading a needle and raving insanity is the smallest eye in creation.Collection: Eye
But the true evil of drink lies in the disillusion: that the initial pleasure very soon evaporates, leaving a demoralizing craving for more, which is not even temporarily pleasurable. Which then leads to deterioration of the faculties of both body and mind; plus a bewildering lack of co-operation between the two.Collection: Lying
England, where nobody ever says what they mean: and by denying feeling, kill it off stone-cold at the roots.Collection: Mean
Virtue in a man doesn't make you want to grab him.Collection: Men
The wretched Artist himself is alternatively the lowest worm that ever crawled when no fire is in him; or the loftiest God that ever sand when the fire is going.Collection: Art
none of what I know is out of books. ... I prefer tactual learning. Touching, on the quick of the sore nail, of present, mobile life. To toy, to gnaw, to tear: at the living element of pain. Like at a living drumstick.Collection: Pain
I am unable, mentally incapable, of relating the dead thing, the broken body refusing to divulge why or where the occupant has gone, to the thing that was alive.Collection: Grief
Jealousy is the lifelong noose hanging about the neck of love.Collection: Jealousy
Fearful as reality is, it is less fearful than evasions of reality. Look steadfastly into the slit, pinpointed malignant eyes of reality as an old-hand trainer dominates his wild beasts.Collection: Eye
I had got to the dawn of the beautiful not caring, but fully aware, stage, which degenerates so imperceptibly into the doing something unpermissible stage.Collection: Beautiful
But there is that about well-intentioned advice that has the opposite effect of the one intended, and causes a Spanish fly of perversity to enter into the hitherto passive soul.Collection: Opposites
There is nothing harder for an Artist than to retain his Artistic integrity in the tomb of success. A tomb, nevertheless, which nearly every Artist: whether he admits it or not; naturally wants to get into.Collection: Success
In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.Collection: America
... the mere thought of going near a man who is not mellowly pickled, and whose breath reeks of his native fleshy self, is squeamishly unpalatable to me.Collection: Men
Anybody who thinks there is any vague chance of adult exchange with a child is up the spout; and would be much less disappointed if they recognized the chasm unbridgeably dividing them.Collection: Children
money ... is only important when you have none; and though it may not be everything, it goes a very long way towards blocking up the winter draft of age.Collection: Block
Love can bear anything better than ridicule.Collection: Bears
I don't trust sentimentality in men; it goes with tyranny; you can't have one without the other.Collection: Men
There is a great gulf between the really creative person and normal people. The totally creative person does not have the rest of his life in proper proportion.Collection: People
[On journalists:] They are the scavengers of society who, possessing no guts of their own, tear out the guts of celebrities. They have the sycophantic, false enthusing gush of maiden aunts: who are accustomed to being trampled on doormats.Collection: Aunt
[On journalists:] They are as disruptive a menace to the public body: as grating turds in the intestines are to the private body.Collection: Body
[On journalists:] ... however lyingly libellous they may be: nobody can seriously hurt the reputation of a Great person. If he is hurt: he is not Great. They can but scratch at his skin with their mice nails.Collection: Hurt
There is, happily, no limit to the faith of human nature in believing what it wants to believe.Collection: Believe