Best 16 quotes of Kay Boyle on MyQuotes

Ah, trouble, trouble, there are the two different kinds ... there's the one you give and the other you take.

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.

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

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

Springtime is a season we tend to forget as we grow older, and yet far back in our memories, like the landscape of a country visited long ago, it's always there.

The decision to speak out is the vocation and lifelong peril by which the intellectual must live.

whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing.

You can reconstruct the picture from chaos and memory's ruins.

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

America, the only America that would endure, I believed now with a conviction as sharp as a knife turning in my breast, did not belong to Judge Thayer, or to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts, or to the President of the United States, who had refused a shoemaker and a fish peddler his word of clemency. The American that lent me its direction forever now was Lola's, and it was Bill Williams, and Mother's and Michael's, and mine; and I knew, with a terrible humility in the presence of their innocence, that it was Saco's and Vanzetti's as well.

Collecting statistics at camp Zachary Taylor after the armistice [WW1 1918], I found that out of two hundred and fifty men from Kentucky and Tennessee, ninety were completely illiterate, several were actual imbeciles, two had syphilitic rheumatism; and any number had married at childhood ages, from twelve - the youngest - to seventeen. They had married girls from nine - the youngest - to fourteen. So I am ready to believe that the Faulkner and Caldwell depictions of ingrown sections of the country are based upon actual conditions....

I heard the military bands playing with false and terrible cheer in the streets as the recruits went off to war [WW1]. I had beat the bed with my fists then, and cried tears of rage that young men must march off to this artful ad calculated accompaniment to places where wagon roads would be laid across their bones.

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

The puritanical conscience is the coldest and cruelest of all the self-flagellating consciences to bear, for it stamps the sweet abandon out of life entirely. .... The puritanical conscience, with its little grey bonnet tied under its chin....

There is no way for even the most honest among us to look into memory's dreamy, evasive eyes and know she can be persuaded not to lie, not to betray.

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.