Conrad Aiken: Trending quotes

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Conrad Aiken: 140 quotes2 likes

“A small but brilliant advance made today by someone’s awareness may for the moment reach a very small audience, but insofar as it’s valid and beautiful, it will make its way and become part of the whole world of consciousness. So in that sense it’s all working toward this huge audience, and all working toward a better man.”

Conrad Aiken

The Paris Review interview (1963)

“When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit,
And then we shall die no more.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Was forty, then, too old for work like this?
Why should it be? He'd never been afraid—
His eye was sure, his hand was steady...
But dreams had meanings.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked.
And death was observed with sudden cries,
And birth with laughter and pain.
And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies
And night came down again.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“As darkness falls
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live tonight? Where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit halls which reach no end.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees
What we are blind to,—we who mass and crowd
From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!
I am dissolved and woven again…
Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.
Thousands of voices weave in the rain.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,
Through many doors to the one door of all.
Soon as it's opened we shall hear a music:
Or see a skeleton fall...”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“I bound her to me in all soft ways,
I bound her to me in a net of days,
Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word.
How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you?
There is no use: we cry: and are not heard.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“The wind shrieks, the wind grieves;
It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again;
And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams
And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,
Vaguely and incoherently, some dream
Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills...
A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;
Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“We developed a shorthand language of our own which we fell into for the rest of our lives whenever we met, no holds barred — all a matter of past reference, a common language, but basically affection, along with humor, and appreciation of each other’s minds, and of Krazy Kat. Faced with England, and the New World, and Freud and all, we always managed to relax, and go back to the kidding, and bad punning, and drinking, to the end. It really was marvelous.”

Conrad Aiken

On his friendship with T. S. Eliot
The Paris Review interview (1963)

“Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened.
Again I loved, and love itself was darkened.
Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days.
The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent.
The doors of night are closed. We go our ways.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“My veins are afire with music,
Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light;
I shall dream to her secret heart tonight…”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Two lovers move in the crowd like a link of music,
We press upon them, we hold them, and let them pass;
A chord of music strikes us and straight we tremble;
We tremble like wind-blown grass.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain,
Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye.
They trembled from coign to coign, and tower to tower,
Along high terraces quicker than dream they flew.
And some of them steadily glowed, and some soon vanished,
And some strange shadows threw.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“You know, without my telling you, how sometimes
A word or name eludes you, and you seek it
Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it,
Lying in wait for it to spring upon it,
Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound:
Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest,
You hear it, see it flash among the branches,
And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it—
Well, it was so I followed down this music,
Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry,
Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted,
Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“My heart is torn with the sound of raucous voices,
They shout from the slums, from the streets, from the crowded places,
And tunes from the hurdy-gurdy that coldly rejoices
Shoot arrows into my heart.”

Conrad Aiken

Source: Discordants (1916), II

“Each gleaming point of light is like a seed
Dilating swiftly to coiling fires.
Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face,
Each hurrying face records its strange desires.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)