The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman - who is much of a woman - is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.

The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.