Caitlin Thomas Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow.

Caitlin Thomas
There is a great gulf between the really creative person and normal people. The totally creative person does not have the rest of his life in proper proportion.

Caitlin Thomas
In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.

Caitlin Thomas
Between threading a needle and raving insanity is the smallest eye in creation.

Caitlin Thomas
Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.

Caitlin Thomas
Never be so simple as to seek for happiness: it is not a bird that you can put in a cage.

Caitlin Thomas
I had got to the dawn of the beautiful not caring, but fully aware, stage, which degenerates so imperceptibly into the doing something unpermissible stage.

Caitlin Thomas
If happiness comes at all: which is by no means prearranged; it comes by the way, while you are seeking for something else. Something outside yourself, beyond yourself: in a brief absorption of self-forgetfulness.

Caitlin Thomas
It is about time that soft meaningless word: Love; was taken out of the dictionary. So that instead of saying: I will love you for ever; it would be a much more convincing proof to say: I will endure you for ever.

Caitlin Thomas
None of what I know is out of books.... I prefer tactual learning. Touching, on the quick of the sore nail, of present, mobile life. To toy, to gnaw, to tear: at the living element of pain. Like at a living drumstick.

Caitlin Thomas
Jealousy is the lifelong noose hanging about the neck of love.

Caitlin Thomas
England, where nobody ever says what they mean: and by denying feeling, kill it off stone-cold at the roots.

Caitlin Thomas
There is nothing harder for an Artist than to retain his Artistic integrity in the tomb of success. A tomb, nevertheless, which nearly every Artist: whether he admits it or not; naturally wants to get into.

Caitlin Thomas
Anybody who thinks there is any vague chance of adult exchange with a child is up the spout; and would be much less disappointed if they recognized the chasm unbridgeably dividing them.

Caitlin Thomas
But the true evil of drink lies in the disillusion: that the initial pleasure very soon evaporates, leaving a demoralizing craving for more, which is not even temporarily pleasurable. Which then leads to deterioration of the faculties of both body and mind; plus a bewildering lack of co-operation between the two.

Caitlin Thomas
When the desire is on for one particular person, nobody else will do.

Caitlin Thomas
The wretched Artist himself is alternatively the lowest worm that ever crawled when no fire is in him: or the loftiest God that ever sang when the fire is going.

Caitlin Thomas
Resignation, perhaps the most stifling word in the language.

Caitlin Thomas
Always aspire higher than you can. For, however high you aspire, you will never arrive more than halfway up the cliff of your aspiration.

Caitlin Thomas
Money... is only important when you have none; and though it may not be everything, it goes a very long way towards blocking up the winter draft of age.

Caitlin Thomas
Anybody who drinks seriously is poor: so poor, poor, extra poor, me.

Caitlin Thomas
I am unable, mentally incapable, of relating the dead thing, the broken body refusing to divulge why or where the occupant has gone, to the thing that was alive.

Caitlin Thomas
There is this malign curse laid on dipsomaniacs. That they must absolutely have a drink: in order to feel strong enough to stop drinking.

Caitlin Thomas
One should never go back to a place one has loved; for, however, rough the going forward is, it is better than the snuffing out-of-love return.

Caitlin Thomas
The mere thought of going near a man who is not mellowly pickled, and whose breath reeks of his native fleshy self, is squeamishly unpalatable to me.

Caitlin Thomas
But there is that about well-intentioned advice that has the opposite effect of the one intended, and causes a Spanish fly of perversity to enter into the hitherto passive soul.

Caitlin Thomas
There is, happily, no limit to the faith of human nature in believing what it wants to believe.

Caitlin Thomas
There is a brotherliness about a drinking person, which is coldly lacking in the straight and narrow enemies of drink; the difference between the two is more marked than nationality or belief: it is an opposite species altogether. It is against the unwritten laws of congeniality for them to mix. For me, a man who does not drink is distinctly indecent.

Caitlin Thomas