Conrad Aiken Quotes

The hiss was now becoming a roar - the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow - but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.

All lovely things will have an ending, all lovely things will fade and die; and youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.

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.

[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.

Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!

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.

O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best beloved and I, close well above us, that we may rest forever, sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.

Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a student, but my casual reading was enormous.

It's time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.

No god save self, that is the way to live.

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.

Life is the thing--the song of life-- The eager plow, the thirsty knife!

I ascend from darkness And depart on the winds of space for I know not where; My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket, And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.

The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead, The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

We are the ghosts of the singing furies .

Death is one dream out of another flowing.

The truth--a hideous spectacle!

Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

I think it's very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself.

I think there's an enormous lot of talent around, and somewhere amongst these I'm sure that something will emerge, given time.

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable.

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.

I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England.

I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.

I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.

Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck-- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show.

Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust, The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.

Time is a dream ... a destroying dream; It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.

I love you, what star do you live on?

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive.