Conrad Aiken: Likeness

Conrad Aiken was American novelist and poet. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Conrad Aiken: 140 quotes2 likes

“The poet walked alone in a cold late rain,
And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds;
For his lover was dead, he never would love again.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“The days, the nights, flow one by one above us,
The hours go silently over our lifted faces,
We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea.
Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together.
We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.”

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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;
He thought of the pail... Why, then, was it forgotten?
Because he would not need it?”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“We flow, we descend, we turn... and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air...”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“My heart has become as hard as a city street,
The horses trample upon it, it sings like iron,
All day long and all night long they beat,
They ring like the hooves of time.”

Conrad Aiken

Source: Discordants (1916), II

“It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.”

Conrad Aiken

Senlin: A Biography (1918)

“One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him;
The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow.
He sings of a house he lived in long ago.
It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in;
The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“We rub the darkness from our eyes,
And face our thousand devious secret mornings...
And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,
Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer
Compassionate over our towers bending.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple,
Two lovers blow together like music blowing:
And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea.
Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them,
They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“One white rose… or is it pink, to-day?'
They pause and smile, not caring what they say,
If only they may talk.
The crowd flows past them like dividing waters.
Dreaming they stand, dreaming they walk.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“What was this dream we had, a dream of music,
Music that rose from the opening earth like magic
And shook its beauty upon us and died away?
The long cold streets extend once more before us.
The red sun drops, the walls grow grey.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“Time is a dream, he thinks, a destroying dream;
It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;
It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.
Where was the woman he loved? Where was his youth?
Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire?
Even a dream grows grey at last and falls.”

Conrad Aiken

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)