I believe in no beneficient influence in the universe and as all in the end brings us up against mystery, all speculation is but a virtuosity of words. Each person's religion is personal and incommunicable, no terms can enclose it. I hold to the integrity of the individual and uphold the old simple virtues of honesty, consideration for others, and fidelity to my pledge. An opening of the heart is the best throw and imagination our best escape from our dilemmas. I profoundly distrust the craft of the resourceful mind forever spinning its web of salvation, forever explaining the inexplicable. Faith serves for those who have it. There is a realm of spirit, however, in which we enter for our refreshment, in no way allied to the supernatural. My religion antedates Christianity and even the Greeks and is to be found in the time of the Egyptians, it has nothing to do with 'modern man'. But as long as I am a fellow mortal among my earth fellow mortals my fate is bound up with theirs and I consider I should on every occasion which presents itself throw in my influence with what is outspoken against all forms of tyranny, cruelty and oppression. My mind is multiple and I have a dramatic interest in the panorama about me, but life without the intimations that come to us through silent contemplation, through art, through nature, through music, through poetry, through the ineffable, is a wilderness or a blind labyrinth. Habit destroys us, our evil tempers cloud our vision, eternity resolves all and reveals itself to us in the eyes of a cat, as well as in the clouds that move across the horizon.

Journals, Alyse Gregory

(see J.Peltier, Alyse Gregory: A Woman at her Window, Cecil Woolf Publishers, London 1999.)