Wolf Solent Quotes

“What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world?”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“The world is not made of bread and honey…nor of the sweet flesh of girls. This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where men and women are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin, like a monk's habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic continuity---so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy---of human beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery....”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“This killing of his 'mythology' how could he survive it? His 'mythology' had been his escape from life, his escape into a world where machinery could not reach him, his escape into a deep, green, lovely world where thoughts unfolded themselves like large, beautiful leaves growing out of fathoms of blue-green water!”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Life seemed entirely composed of weeping faces, old men sneaking up bedroom-stairs, tombstones with spittle trickling down, and black-edged calling-cards. He felt as if the First Cause of the Universe were a small, malignant grub, radiating a deadly blight in withering, centrifugal air-waves!”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Nothing is against nature!" he retorted. "That's the mistake people make; and it causes endless unhappiness.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“If only — so he thought to himself later — Gerda's face had been a little less flawless in its beauty, the beauty of her body would have remained as maddening to his senses as it was at the beginning. But the more he had seen of her the more beautiful her face had grown; until it had now reached that magical level of loveliness which absorbs with a kind of absoluteness the whole aesthetic sense, paralysing the erotic sensibility.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Wolf’s wits, moving now, in spite of the fumes of smoke and alcohol, with restored clarity, achieved a momentous orientation of many obscure matters.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“The first thing he did was to attempt to analyse a mental device he was in the habit of resorting to - a device that supplied him with the secret substratum of his whole life. This was a certain trick he had of doing what he called 'sinking into his soul’. This trick had been a furtive custom with him from very early days. In his childhood his mother had often rallied him about it in her light-hearted way, and had applied to these trances, or these fits of absent-mindedness, an amusing but rather indecent nursery name. His father, on the other hand, had encouraged him in these moods, taking them very gravely, and treating him, when under their spell, as if he were a sort of infant magician.
It was, however, when staying in his grandmother's house at Weymouth that the word had come to him which he now always used in his own mind to describe these obsessions. It was the word ‘mythology’ ; and he used it entirely in a private sense of his own.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Damn these indecisions! This accursed difficulty of deciding, of deciding anything at all, seemed to have grown into an obsession with him. To have to decide...that was the worst misery on earth!”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“He remembered to the end of his life what he felt at that moment, while the bone of his lower jaw met the bones of his knuckles pressed so hard against them. He felt absolutely alone – alone in an emptiness that was different from empty space. He did not pity himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself and waited – waited till whatever it was that enclosed him made some sign.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“The day was warm; but the fact that the sky was covered with a filmy veil of grey clouds gave to the vast plain before him the appearance of a landscape whose dominant characteristic consisted in a patient effacement of all emphatic or outstanding qualities. The green of the meadows was a shy, watery green. The verdure of the elm trees was a sombre, blackish monotony. The yellow of the stubble land was a whitish-yellow, pallid and lustreless.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Reason? Justice? The forces that victimized and paralysed him now were those that had created the world. Who was he to contend against them?”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“And it was just this that these accursed inventions were seeking to destroy! They would dissect love, till it became 'an itch of the blood and a permission of the will'; they would kill all calm, all peace, all solitude; they would profane the majesty of death till they vulgarized the very background of existence; they would flout the souls of the lonely upon the earth, until there was not one spot left by land or by water where a human being could escape from the brutality of mechanism, from the hard glitter of steel, from the gaudy insolence of electricity!”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“If there is some monstrous consciousness behind all life,' he thought angrily, 'it's responsible for all the horrors! Come”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“If no one were allowed to be thrilled by anything, as long as someone is made wretched by something, the life of the whole planet would perish!”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“It's absolutely impossible to talk of any woman to another woman without betraying the absent one. They must have blood! Every word you speak is a betrayal. They're not satisfied otherwise.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“It may be a good world,' he remarked sententiously, and 'and it may be a bad world, but it's the world; and us has got to handle 'un with eyes in our heads for landslides.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“As he contemplated the loveliness of her figure, it struck him as infinitely pathetic that even beauty such as hers should be so dependent on the sexual humours of this man or that man for its adequate appreciation.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Looking at her lying there, he thought what an appalling risk these lovers of 'happiness' take, when they bum their ships and trust their lives to the caprice of men.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Were all his better actions only so many Pharisaic sops thrown one by one into the mouth of a Cerberus of selfishness, monstrous and insane? Was”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“He had only one life. That was a basic and relentless fact. An eternity of 'something or other' lay behind him, and an equally obscure eternity of 'something or other' lay in front of him.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“. I'm sceptical about the reality of everything; even about the reality of Nature. Sometimes I think that there are several "Natures" ... several "Universes," in fact ... one inside the other ... like Chinese boxes ...”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Do you ever feel,' he said, 'as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world – as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something that was very important?”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“All inventions,' he thought, 'come from man's brains. And man's soul can escape from them, and even while using them, treat them with contempt – treat them as if they were not! It”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“And he recalled what Jason Otter had said about pity: how if you had pity and there was one miserable consciousness left in the universe, you had no right to be happy.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“I don't understand half of what I read,' Christie began, speaking with extreme precision. 'All I know is that every one of those old books has its own atmosphere for me.”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Wolf took off his hat and stretched back his head, straining his neck as far as it would go, so that without relaxing the movement of walking, his upturned face might become horizontal. In this position he made a hideous grimace into infinity – a grimace directed at the Governing Power of the Universe. What”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“She lives so completely in books that I don't think she takes anything that happens in the real world very seriously. She”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent

“Perhaps I've never known reality as other human beings know it,' he thought. 'My life has been industrious, monotonous, patient. I've carried my load like a camel. And I've been able to do this because it hasn't been my real life at all! My "mythology" has been my real life.' The”
― John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent