Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary was born in the north of Ireland in 1888. His family had been ‘Planter’ landlords in neighbouring Inishowen, a peninsula on the north coast of County Donegal, also in Ulster, since the early years of the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth-century. However, the family had largely lost their Inishowen property on the western shores of Lough Foyle after the passage of the Irish Land Act in 1882. The family dispersed and Cary had uncles who served in the frontier US Cavalry and the Canadian North-West Mounted Police. Most of the Carys wound up in Great Britain. Arthur Cary, his father, trained as an engineer and married Charlotte Joyce, the well-to-do daughter of a Belfast banker. After his son was born in 1888, Arthur moved his family to London.
Throughout his childhood, Cary spent many summers at his grandmother’s house in Ireland and at Cromwell House in England, home of his great-uncle, which served as a base for all the Cary clan. Some of this upbringing is described in the fictionalised memoir A House of Children (1941) and the novel Castle Corner (1938) – i.e., Cary Castle, one of his family’s lost properties in Inishowen in Ulster. Although Cary remembered his West Ulster childhood with affection and wrote about it with great feeling, he was based in England for the rest of his life. The feeling of displacement and the idea that life’s tranquility may be disturbed at any moment marked Cary and informs much of his writing. (via Wikipedia)
On Love:
Love doesn’t grow on the trees like apples in Eden. It’s something you have to make. And you must use your imagination to make it too, just like anything else.
She had never realized how little her “devotion” meant to a man who was himself “devoted” – not even to a human being but to something that seemed to his imagination (which had done so much to create it) infinitely more beautiful and worthy – the Cause.
On Life:
For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.
So evil is the brood of the slogans that the most splendid and noble battle cries, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, bred nothing but new and more cunning, more hypocritical despots, better organised murder, popular nationalism drunk with the conceit of hooligans, militarism as the tool of demagogues, hatred not to be assuaged by the blood of millions and a century of tears.
On God:
God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.
On Religion:
Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul – politics does the same thing for the body.
Other Quotes:
To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius. And easier. Because it’s true. It’s a new world every heart beat.
The truth is that life is hard and dangerous; he who seeks his own happiness does not find it; he who is weak must suffer; that he who demands love will be disappointed; that he who is greedy will not be fed; he who seeks peace will find strife; that truth is only for the brave; that joy is only for him who does not fear to be alone; that life is only for the one who is not afraid to die.
Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.
Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.
Plantie is a very strong Protestant, that is to say, he’s against all churches, especially the Protestant: and he thinks a lot of Buddha, Karma and Confucius. He is also a bit of an anarchist and three or four years ago he took up Einstein and vitamins.
I want the best of everything for everybody, and it will cost millions.
It was as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister.