Joyce Cary Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

Poets have started most of the revolutions, especially nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

Joyce Cary
Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.

Joyce Cary
Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.

Joyce Cary
Teaching, in short, like everything else that conveys a meaning in words, is an art, and you can't be a good artist unless you believe you are giving a truth.

Joyce Cary
Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he's against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.

Joyce Cary
I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.

Joyce Cary
To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it's true. It's a new world every heart beat.

Joyce Cary
The politician is responsible for law, for physical security, and in a world of tumult, of perpetual conflict, he has the alternatives, roughly again, of persuading people or shooting them. In the democracies, we persuade. And this gives great power to the spellbinder, the artist in words, the preacher, the demagogue, whatever you call him.

Joyce Cary
She had a mannish manner of mind and face, able to feel hot and think cold.

Joyce Cary
Others complain that I don't make the fundamental idea plain enough. This is every writer's dilemma. Your form is your meaning, and your meaning dictates the form. But what you try to convey is reality—the fact plus the feeling, a total complex experience of a real world. If you make your scheme too explicit, the framework shows and the book dies. If you hide it too thoroughly, the book has no meaning and therefore no form. It is a mess.

Joyce Cary
We have to have conceptual knowledge to organize our societies, to save our own lives, to lay down general ends for conduct, to engage in any activity at all, but that knowledge, like the walls we put up to keep out the weather, shuts out the real world and the sky. It is a narrow little house which becomes a prison to those who can't get out of it.

Joyce Cary