Mary Butts > Quotes

“All night the earth and the heavens followed their usual arrangements. Stars passed: an immense tide hung over them. A silent sea raced back with the sun, its wave turn-over small, delicate and comfortless. The most glorious of all stars hung above the sun's threshold and went out. An hour later the sun governed the earth again, mist-chasing, flower-opening, bird-rousing, ghost-driving, spirit-shepherding back out the various gates of sleep.”
― Mary Butts, The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner

“Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.”
― Mary Butts, The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner

“Every day he woke to the desire to take the world by the throat, and choke it. He had no illusion that the world wanted to be saved; still less that it was ready to be saved by him. Ready!—it was punching at him with agonizing blows, to be rid of him, once and for all. He woke up. Even that was not true now. It had been true once, but now the world was getting over any slight alarm he might have caused it. It was leaving him alone, to realise the wounds it had given him. Sometimes it was even tolerant and trying to patch him up.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories

“He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.”
― Mary Butts, The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner

“She saw the skin pull under the driver's ears and knew that he was laughing.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories

“the things you hate are only your body being knocked about by phenomena”
― Mary Butts

“He turned his steel eyes at me. They hurt me, paralysed me, like the advancing lights of a car. I saw that his body was taut, all of it: also made of steel; that it only worked because it was at an intolerable tension, and that it was our sensation of that tension which had exhausted us, which could no longer be borne. He was the wrong spring which had been put into our machine, that had made Claude ill, George foolish, Boris an anxiety.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories

“Like men of his kind, at cross-purposes with their purpose, there could be nothing fortuitous that happened to him.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories

“Mais pour regner il faut se taire.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories

“But of Paris it can be said that the right bank of the Seine belongs to the world, and the left bank to France.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories

“For some days before, as well as for some nights, Vincent had observed a shadow about the quays. First because it had tried to sell him an obscene book, then because it tried to sell André an obscene book, then because it tried to sell everybody an obscene book.”
― Mary Butts, The Complete Stories