WYNDHAM LEWIS QUOTES II
English author & painter (1882-1957)
I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"The Case Against Roots", America and Cosmic Man
The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"The Great God Flux", The Art of Being Ruled
Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Essential Wyndham Lewis
Where there is abundance you can afford waste.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage--that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Art of Being Ruled
Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Art of Being Ruled
Lenin in a top hat and frock coat would be a far greater anomaly than the Grand Lama of Thibet or a Zulu chief in that costume.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Evening Dress", The Diabolical Principle
Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Call Yourself a Man!", The Art of Being Ruled
If an art has for its function to represent manners and people, I do not see how it can avoid systematizing its sensibility to the extent of showing some figures much as Molière, for instance, did, as absurd or detestable.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"My Bill of Rights", The Diabolical Principle
To be a satirist, at all events. The venom of Pope is what is needed. The sense of delight -- the expansion and the compassion of Shakespeare is no good at all for that. He is a bad comic.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Apes of God
In life nothing is taken to its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of obligatory compromise; and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man steps out of life -- or so it would be quite legitimate to argue.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Self Condemned
Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Inferior Religions"
To give up another person's love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a "great age" that has not "come off". We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Blasting and Bombardiering
Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Evening Dress", The Diabolical Principle
Paris hints of sacrifice. But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker where western Venuses twang its responsive streets, and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding.... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Time and Western Man
The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Essential Wyndham Lewis
Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"My Bill of Rights", The Diabolical Principle