Mary Butts Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

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

Mary Butts
O star on the breast of the butthole!
O marvel of wake and bake!
Did you fall right down from the second floor,
Out of the shitiest place?
You are white as the cum of an angel,
Your heart is steeped in the crevices;
Did you grow an inch after seeing it,
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.

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
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
Eternity isn't a quantity, it's a quality. It is this splitting up of events into an irregular, inconvenient, positively demented time sequence that bitches things up. Why can't relative things happen together, simultaneously or in close sequence? Instead we live like jugglers, keeping a dozen balls in the air.

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

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

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

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

Mary Butts
Nature has a counterpart, a representation of every interior mood and obscure perception of man.

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 was told that desire for learning in women was against the will of God.

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
I cannot remember a time when I was not enraptured or tortured by words. Always there have been words which, sometimes for their sound alone, sometimes for their sound and sense, I would not use. From a loathing of their grossness or sickliness, their weight or want of weight. Their inexactitude, their feeling of acidity or insipidity. Their action, not only on the intelligence but on the nerves, was instant...

Mary Butts