The Brazen Head Quotes

“   "Time was," it said. "Time is," it said. "And time will—"
   But the burning meteor then fell upon it, and neither it nor what destroyed it was ever seen again.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“Young John had always dreaded certain particular mental images, and the worst of all among these was the image of something different from the male organ of generation being thrust into a female's womb. Another was the image of a fiery rod being thrust into a man's anus.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“It did not take Lil-Umbra long with her fifteen-year-old legs and her slender figure to scamper down the quarter-of-a-mile avenue of over-arching elms that led due eastward from the Fortress of Roque, where she lived, to the ancient circle of Druidic stones that had come to be known as "Castrum Sanctum".”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“It may well be that what gives to the wind along that Wessex coast its indescribable mixture of vague sorrow and wild obscure joy comes from its passing, on its unpredictable path, the floating hair of so many love-lorn maidens and the wild-tossed beards of so many desolate old men.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“There are times in life, little lady," he said, "when we can only listen to the ticking of the clock of fate and wait for what is destined to happen. This is one of those times.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“It is perfectly possible for an energetic and powerfully galvanic will to win renown for its owner, while the deepest part of the personality which that towering will-power has to carry along with it, just as a swiftly driving chariot might have to carry in the belly of its body a writhing and squirming serpent, may be secretly twitching and quivering with all manner of maniacal distates and repugnances.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“The demonic delight, which radiated in the train of these thoughts through the whole being of Master Peter, was so deliciously transporting that it carried him away altogether from his material position at that moment, and bore him aloft, as if in a chariot of air and fire, a chariot that flew upward upon the waving of two wings, one of which might have been Space and the other Time, for both together seemed to acquire a mysterious force that soon carried their voyager into a sleep, if sleep it were, where he found himself in reality, if reality it were, beyond all description by the words the human race has hitherto used.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“To horses, dogs and cats, to birds in cages, to pigs in sties, to sheep in folds, to cattle in stalls—to them all he sang his song and danced his dance! When he was eating out-of-doors he would pay court to the nearest toad or frog or blind-worm. When he was sucking an orange before going to bed, he would make overtures to a spider.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“Washed, anointed, oiled, combed and curled, catered for and courted by lovely attendants, and his purpose crowned by a miraculous concatenation of convenient conditions, Bonaventura's instinctive reaction, when he heard this unusual wailing in the rafters of the roof above him and this long-drawn melancholy moaning in the corridors and landings and stairways and cellars beneath him, was simply to feel peevishly annoyed with the God he worshipped.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“Lilith was still playing her perpetual game; and it was revealed to Lady Lilt, and not wholly concealed even from our friend Spardo, that the present object of the girl's felonious wiles was none other than the saintly personage, armoured in the chastity of grey cloth, wrapped in the chastity of grey vapourings, fortified in the chastity of grey theocracy, cramped in the chastity of grey idealism, who was now approaching the entrance to Lost Towers between the door-post on the left and the profile of Tiberius Caesar on the right.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“   He was interrupted by the appearance of the most amazing human figure that any of them, man or beast, had ever seen in his life before. This personage came dancing into their midst, and not one of them could take his eyes off him for a second when once he appeared. He inhaled and sucked in and tried to drain up the essence of every living soul upon that spot, whether such a soul belonged to a man or an animal or a bird or a reptile or a toad or a worm or an insect. None of the three human beings present at that cross-tack in the forest had a flicker of doubt as to who this intruder was, who thus came dancing into the midst of them.
   It was Baron Maldung himself, the Lord of Lost Towers!”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“And when I do say to she: 'Bain't Prior Bog of Bumset as good a church-lord as any old Saint?' she's answer to I is allus the same: 'Bog be Bog and Bumset be Bumset,' she do say, 'but when thee do pray to They Above, 'tis a very different style of Holy Man thee dost need for thee's pass to Salvation!”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“But this was only the first "move", so to speak, in Sir Mort's intercourse with the cosmic multiplicity. The next thing this crazy owner of Roque must needs do was to pull himself out of the hole into which he had descended with such persistence and proceed to shoot himself through the air! On this air-borne quest he was careful to avoid every conceivable collision. He avoided the Moon and he avoided every planet. He avoided all the falling stars.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“Sir Mort was a tall and slender, but a broad-shouldered man, of about sixty, whose most striking physical characteristic was the shape of his skull, which was very long and very narrow and was perched like the skull of a vulture on the top of a long neck. The length and narrowness of Sir Mort's head was emphasized by his deep hollow eye-sockets, out of which his eyes, dark-green in colour, glared forth with a very peculiar effect; for it was as if they had no connection with each other at all, but were, each of them, the solitary eye of a saurian creature whose eye was at the top of its scaly head.”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head

“It must have been after more than five minutes of this concentrated examination of the phenomenal shape which this strange growth on the horse's neck was gradually assuming, that the door-keeper suddenly leapt to his feet and began shouting: "Bundy! Bundy! Bundy! come quick! Here's a horse that's going to have two heads! For God's sake come quick, Bundy, and look! It's going to have a man's head as well as its own! Quick! Quick! Bundy! come quick!”
― John Cowper Powys, The Brazen Head