Mary Butts Quotes

#1. Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.

Mary Butts

#2. The things you hate are only your body being knocked about by phenomena

Mary Butts

#3. One should be allowed to choose one's burden.

Mary Butts

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

Mary Butts

#5. 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

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

Mary Butts

#7. Sink twice before you strike out for land.

Mary Butts

#8. Nature has a counterpart, a representation of every interior mood and obscure perception of man.

Mary Butts

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

Mary Butts

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Art is the god you have not seen.

Mary Butts

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

Mary Butts

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

Mary Butts

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

Mary Butts