W.N.P. Barbellion Quotes

#1. When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of the disease and all I said before I died- something heroic, of course!

W.N.P. Barbellion

#2. My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, butintellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.

W.N.P. Barbellion

#3. Suffering does not only insulate. It drops its victim in an ocean desert where he sees men as distant ships passing. I not only feel alone, but very far away from you all.

W.N.P. Barbellion

#4. We are all such egotists that a sorrow or hardship - provided it is great enough - flatters our self-importance. We feel that a calamity by overtaking us has distinguished us above our fellows. A man likes not to be ignored even by a railway accident. A man with a grievance is always happy.

W.N.P. Barbellion

#5. Suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything ... To be alive is so incredible that all I can do is to lie still and merely breathe.

W.N.P. Barbellion

#6. I can remember wondering as a child if I were a young Macaulay or Ruskin and secretly deciding that I was. My infant mind even was bitter with those who insisted on regarding me as a normal child and not as a prodigy.

W.N.P. Barbellion

#7. As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bath, dress, shave, breakfast once for all, if we could 'cut' these monotonous cycles of routine. If the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we were immortal!

W.N.P. Barbellion

#8. From the drawing-room window I see pass almost daily an old gentleman with white hair, a firm step, broad shoulders, healthy pink skin, a sunny smile - always singing to himself as he goes - a happy, rosy-cheeked old fellow, with a rosy-cheeked mind I should like to throw mud at him.

W.N.P. Barbellion

#9. I felt as lonely and desolate as a man suddenly fallen from the clouds into an unknown town on the Antarctic Continent built of ice and inhabited by Penguins. Who are these people? I asked myself irritably.

W.N.P. Barbellion