Caitlin Thomas
Caitlin Thomas
Caitlin Thomaswas the wife of the poet and writer Dylan Thomas. Their marriage was a stormy affair, fuelled by alcohol and infidelity, though the couple remained together until Dylan's death in 1953. After her husband's death she wrote the book Leftover Life to Kill, an account of her self-exile to Italy. She paints a picture of a grieving widow seeking solace in distance, a younger lover, and alcohol...
mean roots feelings
England, where nobody ever says what they mean: and by denying feeling, kill it off stone-cold at the roots ...
pain book learning
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.
bears ridicule
Love can bear anything better than ridicule.
drinking men law
There is a brotherliness about a drinking person, which is coldly lacking in the straight and narrow enemies of drink; the difference between the two is more marked than nationality or belief: it is an opposite species altogether. It is against the unwritten laws of congeniality for them to mix. For me, a man who does not drink is distinctly indecent ...
men want virtue
Virtue in a man doesn't make you want to grab him.
vulgarity-is heartless littles
A lot of warm vulgarity is incomparably preferable to a little bit of pinched niceness
men self native
... the mere thought of going near a man who is not mellowly pickled, and whose breath reeks of his native fleshy self, is squeamishly unpalatable to me.
grief broken gone
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.
desire particular persons
when the desire is on for one particular person, nobody else will do ...
beautiful caring degenerates
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.
grief gay gaiety
there is no gaiety as gay as the gaiety of grief.
sex love-is thieves
Sex divorced from love is the thief of personal dignity.
lying true-evil two
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.
people creative doe
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.