A Glastonbury Romance QUOTES

1 " The truth was that without being in the least conscious of the importance for humanity of the psychic law he had blundered upon or of its rarity in the world, Sam had found out that when a person is liberated from possessiveness, from ambition, from the exigencies of desire, from domestic claims, from every sort of authority over others, he can enjoy sideways and incidentally, as he follows any sort of labour or quest the most exquisite trances of absorption into the mysterious essence of any patch of earth-mould, or any fragment of gravel, or any slab of paving-stone, or any tangle of weeds, or any lump of turf that he may come upon as he goes along. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

2 " Whatever the cause may have been of what happened to those two behind those drawn blinds, both visitations came and went in no more than a hundred tickings of the watch in the man's pocket. Phenomena that pass so quickly—thought-elementals floating in and floating out, and this death-cold touch of the draught of decomposition—surely they are beneath notice, beneath analysis, beneath explanation? On the contrary, the very essence of life is revealed in such fleeting impressions; and in experiences such as these Eternity itself can be heard moaning and weeping, as its Cimmerian waters advance and recede around the lamplit promontories of Time. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

3 " Mr. Wollop had no quarrel with young men who had formulas for dodging responsibility, as long as they did their work in the shop. What he was conscious of was a certain puzzled contempt for anyone whose selfishness was so weak and shaky that it required a pious formula! Mr. Wollop needed no formula, pious or otherwise. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

4 " Mr. Finn Toller in his natural condition was no engaging sight. In his present state he was a revolting object. He was a sandy-haired individual with a loose, straggly, pale-coloured beard. He gave the impression of being completely devoid of both eyebrows and eyelashes, so bleached and whitish in his case were those normal appendages to the human countenance. His mouth was always open and always slobbering, but although his whole expression was furtive and dodging, his teeth were large and strong and wolfish. Mr. Toller looked, in fact, like a man weak to the verge of imbecility who had been ironically endowed with the teeth of a strong beast of prey. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

5 " Mary's thoughts were like a rain of bitterness and a dew of sweetness gathered in the hollows of a tree-root. A brimming over from them all would have escaped and vanished if she had tried to express them in any sort of speech. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

6 " What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life, and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature, which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

7 " There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second! The Hindu philosophies that dream of the One, the Eternal, as an Ultimate behind the arbitrariness of Personal Will are deluded. They are in reality—although they talk of "Spirit"—under the bondage of the idea of the body and under the bondage of the idea of physical matter as an "ultimate."
Apart from Personality, apart from Personal Will, there is no such "ultimate" as Matter, there is no such "ultimate" as Spirit. Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality, dominating both Life and Death to its own arbitrary and wilful purposes. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

8 " Harry Stickles certainly did possess quite a number of peculiarities which would have been nerve-racking to any less well-constituted girl. These nasty little ways were made worse by the man's preposterous and incredible conceit. But Nancy had been given by Nature one supreme gift—wherein only one other person in Glastonbury rivalled her, and that was John Crow—the gift of forgetting. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

9 " It is one of the psychological mistakes that the world makes, to assume that a man whose inclination drives him on to attempt seduction after seduction is a man of more ardent erotic passion than the more constant lover. The very reverse is the case. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

10 " 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

11 " If Finn Toller had in his nervous organisation anything resembling what in popular parlance is called a "complex," such a "complex" consisted in the idea—almost, although not quite, a complete illusion—that people were continually wanting to bribe him to commit some murder. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

12 " It is a thing of nerves, this "brutish sting," this erotic obsession, of nerves and of the psyche, the soul, the self! The flesh is pathetically, beautifully, grotesquely innocent. It is in the nerves that all lecheries, all lusts, all passions lie...in the nerves and the imagination. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

13 " One of Mr. Geard's deepest characteristics, a characteristic wherein his long line of Saxon ancestors, preserving their obstinate identity under centuries of Norman tyranny, had provided the basis, and his own singular psychic aplomb the magnetic poise, was his power of relaxing his whole being and enjoying physical sensations without the least self-consciousness or embarrassment in anyone's presence. This characteristic, this complete absence of nervous self-consciousness, always had a reassuring effect upon women, children and animals, as it doubtless would have had upon savages. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

14 " Mr. Geard was one of those men whose physical phlegm is so thick and deep that it requires a series of material shocks to rouse the full awareness in them of the taste and tang of life. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

15 " Thus did these two, the man from Wales and the man from Norfolk, enter the silent streets of the town of Glastonbury. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

16 " The day was one of those early Spring days that for some mysterious reason, very hard to analyse, are felt to be ill-omened and unpleasant. Something was certainly wrong with this day! All animal nerves felt it. All human nerves felt it. All living things were irritable, restless, disturbed; sick without being sick; sad without being sad; annoyed without any apparent cause for annoyance! "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

17 " It is hard to be impersonal in a cosmos that runs to personality. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

18 " All that his tipsiness did was to make him five times more his natural self than in normal times. And Mr. Geard's natural self was a thing of mountainous potency. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

19 " Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever vanishing. Never or Always. "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance

20 " I know now what the Grail is. It is the desire of the generations mingling like water with the Blood of Christ, and caught in a fragment of Substance that is beyond Matter! It is a little nucleus of Eternity, dropped somehow from the outer spaces upon one particular spot! "

― John Cowper Powys , A Glastonbury Romance