Ted Hughes: Trending quotes (page 2)

“He could not stand. It was not
That he could not thrive, he was born
With everything but the will –
That can be deformed, just like a limb.
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.”

“The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her and I knew it”

“You are who you choose to be.”

“There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.”

“The Shell

The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.

You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me.”

“The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.”

“What happened casually remains”

“Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.”

“The wolf is living for the earth.”

“I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars…”

“I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.”

“In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness

But the jewel you lost was blue.”

“Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.”

“The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.”

“This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.”

“Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.”

“The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.”

“The brassy wood-pigeons
Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun
Rises upon a world well-tried and old.”

“It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot.
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.”