It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion – death brought them into harmony. Laurence Housman Read Quote
The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale. Laurence Housman Read Quote
The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted. Laurence Housman Read Quote
The man who bears my name, and who claims to be me, was born on July 15, 1865, the sixth in a family of seven. He was an ugly child, and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved. Laurence Housman Read Quote
That was luck: I should not then have been a conscientious objector; but I am quite sure that the abominations of war would have made me one, as soon as I got to the front. Laurence Housman Read Quote
Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment. Laurence Housman Read Quote
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released – to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like. Laurence Housman Read Quote
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world. Laurence Housman Read Quote
My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative. Laurence Housman Read Quote
My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books – of poems – better than all mine put together. Laurence Housman Read Quote
