Mary Butts Quotes

Mary Butts paints lyrical, dreamy verses about stars, rivers and celestial beauty, appealing to readers who enjoy poetic imagination.

13 quotes

  1. 'O star on the breast of the river! O marvel of bloom and grace! Did you fall right down from heaven, Out of the sweetest place? You are white as the thoughts of an angel, Your heart is steeped in the sun; Did you grow in the Golden City, My pure and radiant one?' 'Nay, nay, I fell not out of heaven; None gave me my saintly white; It slowly grew from the darkness, Down in the dreary night. From the ooze of the silent river, I win my glory and grace, White souls fall not, O my poet, They rise to the sweetest place.'

  2. One should be allowed to choose one's burden.

  3. There are two kinds of reading, reading which is contemplation - even a kind of vision & reading for information. For the first only the best will do, for the rest - then one can let in anything one would like to read in the world.

  4. If it is true that it is the simplicity of the Einsteinian formulae which constitutes their difficulty, that they are so obvious as to escape notice, it seems to me that this applies to events in life, numberless happenings, perhaps the basic ones, which we, saturated in detail and hurrying through subdivisions, lose sight of.

  5. Not till the end of the war will there be any time for art or love or magic again. Perhaps never again.

  6. It is in the nature of any effort to leave something serviceable behind it.

  7. I thought of my father's wisdom, as though it were buried in a box under a tree. As in the old song - a gold box with a silver pin. Some day I should be grown up, and I should dig up the box and turn the pin.

  8. I am old enough to remember what it was like when the theories of Freud first escaped from the study and the clinic, and the great game of Hunt-the Complex began, to the entertainment and alarm of a war-shattered and disillusioned world.

  9. Frog or pearl, life hid something at the bottom of the cup.

  10. Sink twice before you strike out for land.

  11. Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.

  12. The truth which may not be told, is the truth which cannot be told.

  13. Art is the god you have not seen.