Tarr Quotes

“An uncomfortable thing happened now. He realised suddenly all the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and cinematographically. He was seized with panic. He must make a good impression. From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse. For he was unaccustomed to act with calculation. There he was like some individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince; who—just in the middle of the audience—when he would have been getting over his first embarrassment —is overcome with a tardy confusion, the imagination in some way giving a jump. It is the imagination, repressed and as it were slighted, revenging itself. Casting about desperately for means of handling the situation, he remembered she had spoken of getting a dog to guide her. What had she meant? Anyway, he grasped at the dog. He could regain possession of himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void that must exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came in as ally. This, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious. All he asked was to be her dog! Only wished to impress her as a dog! Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter. He would humbly follow her up, put himself at her disposition, not be exigent. It was a role difficult to refuse him. Sense of security the humility of this resolution brought about, caused him to regain a self-possession. Only it imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“Love performs its natural miracle, and they become part of us; it is a dismemberment to cast them off. Our own blood flows out after them when they go.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self,”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“Lowndes was a colleague, who was not very active, but had just enough money to be a cubist, that was to say quite a lot.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“Anything that survives the artist’s death is not life but belated drama.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“You're a terrible feller,” said Butcher. “If you had your way, you'd leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in the savage state of the Ancient Britons; figuratively.” He hiccuped. “Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous 'national characteristics' we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific force on which new and realler 'national flavours' would very soon sprout.” “I quite agree,” Butcher jerked out energetically. He ordered another Laager. “I agree with what you say. If we don't give up dreaming, we shall get spanked. I have given up my gypsies. That was very public-spirited of me?” He looked coaxingly. "If every one would give up their gypsies, their jokes and their gentlemen—. 'Gentlemen' are worse than gypsies.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr