That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.

That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.

You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

I want the wonder back again, or I shall die.

Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking.