A.L. Rowse > Quotes

“When you consider the superstitions and the imaginings of the old Cornish country-folk up to my grandmother's day, how their lives were swaddled in them from the cradle to the grave, their daily actions in large part determined by them - so many things you would not think of doing, like starting a journey on a Friday, or looking at the moon through a pane of glass, or failing to wear something new on Whitsunday - their minds haunted by ghosts and fears, you have a fair idea of what the minds of these people in the sixteenth century were like. It was a life full of shadows that frightened them and dangers that might come home to them; how much more so in those days when their fears had the sanction, and even the corroboration, of the elect and the intelligent: when a uniform religion existed to enforce its lessons and draw the moral. However, no doubt it filled up life for them, made it more interesting and exciting, more mysterious and incalculable; it added a dimension to it, where the modern uneducated, rid of their fears and ghosts, are apt to find life empty and void of meaning.”
― A. L. Rowse

“O moon that makes restless the hearts of men,
That lays an insane beam upon their mind,
And laughing makes men mad.

- Sunday Night: Truro”
― A.L. Rowse, Poems of Deliverance

“In the inmost recesses of consciousness,
The wound opening inwards,
The spirit too proud to admit an injury,
Incessantly grazed and torn again
By the insensitive, the enemy that hates
Difference, quality that escapes submission
To common complacency, impure hypocrisy-
That would annihilate what is uncommon,
Challenging their meanness, their lack of standards
With something electric and alive, a vibrancy
That offers not a new Heaven and a new Earth
But life, more life and light-
To be rejected.

- The Parting”
― A.L. Rowse, Poems of Deliverance

“It is not surprising that with the experience of our own age, suffering should come foremost, and out of suffering, in the end, emergence, fortitude, loyalty, faith in each other, overwhelming love.”
― A.L. Rowse, Poems of Deliverance

“I don't want to have my money scalped off me to maintain other people's children. I don't like other people; I particularly don't like their children; I deeply disapprove of their proliferation making the globe uninhabitable. The fucking idiots – I don't want to pay for their fucking.”
― A.L. Rowse, The Diaries of A.L. Rowse