Quotes by Joyce Cary

“Reality becomes a prison to those who cant get out of it”

“Love doesnt grow on trees like apples in Eden - its something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too.”

“For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.”

“Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul / politics does the same thing for the body.”

“Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.”

“I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.”

“The will is never free -- it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car -- it cant steer.”

“[The] world [is] in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”

“God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.”

“It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesnt know -- the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.”

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because its true. Its a new world every heart beat.

Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.

Nothing is a masterpiece - a real masterpiece - till its about two hundred years old. A picture is like a tree or a church, youve got to let it grow into a masterpiece. Same with a poem or a new religion. They begin as a lot of funny words. Nobody knows whether theyre all nonsense or a gift from heaven. And the only people who think anything of em are a lot of cranks or crackpots, or poor devils who dont know enough to know anything. Look at Christianity. Just a lot of floating seeds to start with, all sorts of seeds. It was a long time before one of them grew into a tree big enough to kill the rest and keep the rain off. And its only when the tree has been cut into planks and built into a house and the house has got pretty old and about fifty generations of ordinary lumpheads who dont know a work of art from a public convenience, have been knocking nails in the kitchen beams to hang hams on, and screwing hooks in the walls for whips and guns and photographs and calendars and measuring the children on the window frames and chopping out a new cupboard under the stairs to keep the cheese and murdering their wives in the back room and burying them under the cellar flags, that it begins even to feel like a religion. And when the whole place is full of dry rot and ghosts and old bones and the shelves are breaking down with old wormy books that no one could read if they tried, and the attic floors are bulging through the servants ceilings with old trunks and top-boots and gasoliers and dressmakers dummies and ball frocks and dolls-houses and pony saddles and blunderbusses and parrot cages and uniforms and love letters and jugs without handles and bridal pots decorated with forget-me-nots and a piece out at the bottom, that it grows into a real old faith, a masterpiece which people can really get something out of, each for himself. And then, of course, everybody keeps on saying that it ought to be pulled down at once, because its an insanitary nuisance.

You take a straight tip from the stable, Cokey, if you must hate, hate the government or the people or the sea or men, but dont hate an individual person. Whos done you a real injury. Next thing you know hell be getting into your beer like prussic acid; and blotting out your eyes like a cataract and screaming in your ears like a brain tumour and boiling round your heart like melted lead and ramping though your guts like a cancer. And a nice fool youd look if he knew. It would make him laugh till his teeth dropped out; from old age.

It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.

Why, I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh.

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.

B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.Of course you do, I said, everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox. Go home and go to bed and take some hot lemonade and put on three blankets and sweat it out.But Mr J-Jimson, there must be artists.Yes, and lunatics and lepers, but why go and live in an asylum before youre sent for? If you find life a bit dull at home, I said, and want to amuse yourself, put a stick of dynamite in the kitchen fire, or shoot a policeman. Volunteer for a test pilot, or dive off Tower Bridge with five bobs worth of roman candles in each pocket. Youd get twice the fun at about one-tenth of the risk.

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.

Girl going past clinging to a young mans arm. Putting up her face like a duck to the moon. Drinking joy. Green in her eyes. Spinal curvature. No chin, mouth like a frog. Young man like a pug. Gazing down at his sweetie with the face of a saint reading the works of God. Hold on, maiden, youve got him. Hes your boy. Look out, Puggy, that isnt a maiden you see before you, its a work of imagination. Nail him, girlie. Nail him to the contract. Fly laddie, fly off with your darling vision before she turns into a frow, who spends all her life thinking of what the neighbours think.