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Weymouth Sands
John Cowper Powys
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It was characteristic of the vein of unhappy sluggishness and inertness in him that only when impressions had subsided into the remote past could he be thrilled by them. The reality of the present seemed always weighted with something hurting.”
“Children's aesthetic sense is a deep half-animal feeling and when it is outraged it leaves a wound behind it that never quite heals up.”
“With its green curtains and green carpet, with its green valences round its green arm-chairs, with its green tassels round its vase-bearing brackets, this spacious chamber, designed to pleasure their dead mother before either of them were born, was like a mausoleum to Ruth and Rodney.”
“The subtlest of all differences between human beings has to to with their attitude to themselves when they are thinking about themselves. Some caress themselves when they are alone and consciously dote on themselves, whereas others hold themselves apart from themselves with a certain despotic contempt for themselves—and this, too, even in the midst of their liveliest sensations.”
“The mind of a teacher of Latin and a reader of Greek is a queer thing. No sooner had Magnus in his justifiable indignation at her teasing ways imagined himself ravishing Curly by force in her own maiden bed, than such a blind passion of pure love for her swept over him that the blood rushed to his head and he squeezed his bony hands together.”
“Sylvanus was more than shy of himself. A hot rush of blood causing him a curious discomfort, would mount up to his head at the merest approach to physical self-consciousness. He had to forget himself, or he couldn't go on!”
“She still required the dangerous, maddening nerve-quiver of vice to render existence bearable.”
“Oh, I don't care, I don't care, I don't care! I don't care what happens, as long as everything doesn't go on repeating itself!”
“Mr. Gaul took off his spectacles, a gesture of his which always accompanied the reception of anything startling. But he only twisted them in his hands and replaced them carefully. Had the event been more personally arresting he would have cleaned them with his coat-sleeve. Confronted by a shipwreck he might even have rubbed them against his trousers.”
“Jerry had indeed something in him that went beyond Rabelaisianism, in that he not only could get an ecstasy of curious satisfaction from the most drab, ordinary, homely, realistic aspects of what might be called the excremental under-tides of existence but he could slough off his loathing for humanity in this contemplation and grow gay, child-like, guileless.”
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Book Keywords:
unhappiness, children, green-furnishings, themselves, vice, aesthetic, spectacles, latin-teacher, don-t-care, pure-love, shyness, self-consciousness, green, gesture, existence, the-present, rabelais, passion, the-past, peg-frampton