Peter Redgrove Quotes

We rehearse for the big death through the little death of orgasm, through erotic living. Death as transfiguration

~ Peter Redgrove

His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.

~ Peter Redgrove

Data that comes subliminally and is acted upon will look like luck or inspiration.

~ Peter Redgrove

Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.

~ Peter Redgrove

It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.

~ Peter Redgrove

The mystery religions were instituted in order to protect the marvels of the commonplace from those who would devalue them.

~ Peter Redgrove

The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.

~ Peter Redgrove

It is easy to be clever if you leave something important out.

~ Peter Redgrove

Freud was a genius; geniuses are bright but not necessarily right. What they do do, right or wrong, is to provide images that guide, or compel, the lives of the rest of us. If we are not careful we may accept the inevitability of these images. It seems that great men offer us a portion of reality and, because of their greatness, we take it for the whole.

~ Peter Redgrove