Caitlin Thomas Quotes

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

Caitlin Thomas

#2. Jealousy is the lifelong noose hanging about the neck of love.

Caitlin Thomas

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. [On journalists:] They are the scavengers of society who, possessing no guts of their own, tear out the guts of celebrities. They have the sycophantic, false enthusing gush of maiden aunts: who are accustomed to being trampled on doormats.

Caitlin Thomas

#6. The wretched Artist himself is alternatively the lowest worm that ever crawled when no fire is in him; or the loftiest God that ever sand when the fire is going.

Caitlin Thomas

#7. 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

#8. There is no gaiety as gay as the gaiety of grief.

Caitlin Thomas

#9. 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

#10. Resignation, perhaps the most stifling word in the language.

Caitlin Thomas

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Virtue in a man doesn't make you want to grab him.

Caitlin Thomas

#14. Love can bear anything better than ridicule.

Caitlin Thomas

#15. 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

#16. When the desire is on for one particular person, nobody else will do ...

Caitlin Thomas

#17. Anybody who drinks seriously is poor: so poor, poor, extra poor, me.

Caitlin Thomas

#18. 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

#19. Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.

Caitlin Thomas

#20. 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

#21. A lot of warm vulgarity is incomparably preferable to a little bit of pinched niceness

Caitlin Thomas

#22. 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

#23. Between threading a needle and raving insanity is the smallest eye in creation.

Caitlin Thomas

#24. In America they make too much fuss of poets; in London they make too little.

Caitlin Thomas

#25. 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

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

Caitlin Thomas

#27. I don't trust sentimentality in men; it goes with tyranny; you can't have one without the other.

Caitlin Thomas

#28. [On journalists:] They are as disruptive a menace to the public body: as grating turds in the intestines are to the private body.

Caitlin Thomas

#29. Fearful as reality is, it is less fearful than evasions of reality.

Caitlin Thomas

#30. 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

#31. [On journalists:] ... however lyingly libellous they may be: nobody can seriously hurt the reputation of a Great person. If he is hurt: he is not Great. They can but scratch at his skin with their mice nails.

Caitlin Thomas

#32. 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