Conrad Aiken Quotes - Page 2

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

I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It's simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe.

It is moonlight. Alone in the silence I ascend my stairs once more, While waves remote in pale blue starlight Crash on a white sand shore. It is moonlight. The garden is silent. I stand in my room alone. Across my wall, from the far-off moon, A rain of fire is thrown. There are houses hanging above the stars, And stars hung under the sea, And a wind from the long blue vault of time Waves my curtains for me. I wait in the dark once more, swung between space and space: Before the mirror I lift my hands And face my remembered face.

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.

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

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.

Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

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.

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.

Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain; or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing -- to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos -- of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings -- in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, "This is I!

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.

One cricket said to another - come, let us be ridiculous, and say love! love love love love love let us be absurd, woman, and say hate! hate hate hate hate hate and then let us be angelic and say nothing.

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

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

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

Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

The truth--a hideous spectacle!

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

Death is one dream out of another flowing.

All that is beautiful, and all that looks on beauty with eyes filled with fire, like a lover's eyes: all of this is yours; you gave it to me, sunlight! all these stars are yours; you gave them to me, skies!

Variations: II Green light, from the moon, Pours over the dark blue trees, Green light from the autumn moon Pours on the grass ... Green light falls on the goblin fountain Where hesitant lovers meet and pass. They laugh in the moonlight, touching hands, They move like leaves on the wind ... I remember an autumn night like this, And not so long ago, When other lovers were blown like leaves, Before the coming of snow.

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.

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.