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Mary Butts

Mary Butts Biography

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“All night the earth and the heavens followed their usual arrangements. Stars passed: an immense tide hung over them. A silent sea raced back with the sun, its wave turn-over small, delicate and comfortless. The most glorious of all stars hung above the sun's threshold and went out. An hour later the sun governed the earth again, mist-chasing, flower-opening, bird-rousing, ghost-driving, spirit-shepherding back out the various gates of sleep.”

NightStarsNatureDawnSunriseDayThe Death Of Felicity Taverner
Book:The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner
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“He turned his steel eyes at me. They hurt me, paralysed me, like the advancing lights of a car. I saw that his body was taut, all of it: also made of steel; that it only worked because it was at an intolerable tension, and that it was our sensation of that tension which had exhausted us, which could no longer be borne. He was the wrong spring which had been put into our machine, that had made Claude ill, George foolish, Boris an anxiety.”

Metaphor1932CharacterisationSeveral OccasionsScylla And Charybdis
Book:The Complete Stories
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“He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.”

StoriesLyingResponsibilityJustificationExcusesObjectivityDissembling
Book:The Taverner Novels: Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner
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“Every day he woke to the desire to take the world by the throat, and choke it. He had no illusion that the world wanted to be saved; still less that it was ready to be saved by him. Ready!—it was punching at him with agonizing blows, to be rid of him, once and for all. He woke up. Even that was not true now. It had been true once, but now the world was getting over any slight alarm he might have caused it. It was leaving him alone, to realise the wounds it had given him. Sometimes it was even tolerant and trying to patch him up.”

1932Messiah ComplexSeveral OccasionsWiddershins
Book:The Complete Stories
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“I cannot remember a time when I was not enraptured or tortured by words. Always there have been words which, sometimes for their sound alone, sometimes for their sound and sense, I would not use. From a loathing of their grossness or sickliness, their weight or want of weight. Their inexactitude, their feeling of acidity or insipidity. Their action, not only on the intelligence but on the nerves, was instant.”

WantHas BeensSometimesUseFeelingsActionRememberSoundWeightInstantNervesLoathing
Book:The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns
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