Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Caitlin Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 8
Died: 1994
Died: July 31
Author
Autobiographer
Poet
Hammersmith
London
Caitlin MacNamara
Wretched
Lowest
Sand
Fire
Alternatively
Artist
Loftiest
Art
Crawled
Ever
Worm
Going
Worms

More quotes by Caitlin Thomas

Image
Between threading a needle and raving insanity is the smallest eye in creation.
Caitlin Thomas
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
resignation, perhaps the most stifling word in the language.
Caitlin Thomas
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't trust sentimentality in men it goes with tyranny you can't have one without the other.
Caitlin Thomas
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
A lot of warm vulgarity is incomparably preferable to a little bit of pinched niceness
Caitlin Thomas
Image
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
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
But the true evil of drink lies in the disillusion: that the initial pleasure very soon evaporates, leaving a demoralizing craving for more, which is not even temporarily pleasurable. Which then leads to deterioration of the faculties of both body and mind plus a bewildering lack of co-operation between the two.
Caitlin Thomas
Image
England, where nobody ever says what they mean: and by denying feeling, kill it off stone-cold at the roots.
Caitlin Thomas
Image
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
Image
Virtue in a man doesn't make you want to grab him.
Caitlin Thomas
Image
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