Kay Boyle Quotes

It takes courage to say things differently: Caution and cowardice dictate the use of the cliché.

Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956):

Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict.

I happen to like household chores and resent them only when performing them makes it difficult for me to fulfill my professional duties.

Drink was the most fearsome of deceivers ... for it promised one thing and came through with quite another.

Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life ... I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.

Your body is a jewel box.....the jewel is your soul