Henry de Vere Stacpoole > Quotes

“A great sea fog is not homogenous--its density varies: it is honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legerdemain.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon

“The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house under the artu tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across the sea and across the reef. She lit the lagoon to it's dark, dim heart. She lit the coral brains and sand spaces, and the fish casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The keeper of the lagoon rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her reflection on the mirror-like surface into a thousand glittering ripples. She saw the white staring ribs of the form on the reef. Then, peeping over the trees, she looked down into the valley, where the great stone idol had kept it's solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps, and more.

At this base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings, naked, clasped in each other's arms and fast asleep. One could scarcely pity his vigil, had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless and without sin. A marriage according to Nature, without feasts or guests, consummated with accidental cynicism under the shadow of a religion a thousand years dead.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon

“...the thoughts we think in
childhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think when we
are grown up.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon

“When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon

“Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon

“It is a rare experience for a man to hold a tame and unstruggling and unfrightened bird in his hands; next to pressing a woman in his arms, it is the pleasantest tactile sensation he will ever experience, perhaps, in life. He will feel a desire to press it to his heart, if he has such a thing.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon: a romance

“Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist. All that is inessential she casts away, all that is essential she retains; she idealises, and that is why her picture of a lost mistress has had power to keep a man a celibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heart with the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she is also a poet.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon: a romance

“...he was presently rewarded with the sight of the present day disgrace of England. Out of the bathing tent, and into the full sunlight, came a girl with nothing on, for skin tight blue stockinette is nothing in the eyes of Modesty; every elevation, every depression, every crease in her shameless anatomy exposed to a hundred pairs of eyes...'That girl in blue. Don't any of them wear decent clothing?' (Victor asks the gentleman seated next to him.)...'The scraggy ones do,' replied the other...”
― Henry De Vere Stacpoole, The Man Who Lost Himself

“...there was not enough morality to divide in two pieces, but there was enough religion of a sort to furnish a world.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Garden of God

“A memória descarta tudo o que não é essencial e retém o que é. O resto, idealiza, e é por isso que a imagem por ela tecida de uma amante perdida tem o poder de manter um homem no celibato o resto dos seus dias. (...) A memória é pintora, mas é também poeta.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole

“To forget the passage of time you must live in the open air, in a warm climate, with as few clothes as possible upon you. You must collect and cook your own food. Then, after a while, if you have no special ties to bind you to civilization, Nature will begin to do so for you what she does for the savage. You will recognize that it is possible to be happy without books or newspapers, letters or bills. You will recognize the part sleep plays in Nature.”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole

“Nowhere in the world, perhaps, so well as here, could you appreciate Nature’s splendid indifference to the great affairs of Man.”
― H. De Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon

“When I was quite a child,” went on Lestrange, “a child no older than Dicky, my nurse used to terrify me with tales about dead people. I was told I’d go to hell when I died if I wasn’t a good child. I cannot tell you how much that has poisoned my life, for the thoughts we think in childhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think when we are grown up. And can a diseased father—have healthy children?”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon

“Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched;”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon and Other Works

“Le Farge came aft, on to the poop, and stood for a moment looking over the sea on the port side, where a bank of fog had suddenly appeared”
― Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon: a romance