Mary Butts Quotes

“All night the earth and the heavens followed their usual arrangements. Stars passed: an immense tide hung over them. A silent sea raced back with the sun, its wave turn-over small, delicate and comfortless. The most glorious of all stars hung above the sun's threshold and went out. An hour later the sun governed the earth again, mist-chasing, flower-opening, bird-rousing, ghost-driving, spirit-shepherding back out the various gates of sleep.”

— Mary Butts

“Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.”

— Mary Butts

He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.

— Mary Butts

“The things you hate are only your body being knocked about by phenomena”

— Mary Butts

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

— Mary Butts

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

— Mary Butts

“One should be allowed to choose one's burden.”

— Mary Butts

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.

— Mary Butts

“I blessed the power which has filled my life with poetry.”

— Mary Butts

“Sink twice before you strike out for land.”

— Mary Butts

“Nature has a counterpart, a representation of every interior mood and obscure perception of man.”

— Mary Butts

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

— Mary Butts

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

— Mary Butts

“For watching death, and above all, after death; not death in battle, but death after battle, brings one to certain indifferences that are also a form of death.”

— Mary Butts

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.

— Mary Butts

“Art is the god you have not seen.”

— Mary Butts

“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.”

— Mary Butts

Build a little fence of trust around today; Fill the space with loving deeds, and therein stay.

— Mary Butts

“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.”

— Mary Butts