Dylan Thomas Quotes - Page 3

The closer I move To death, one man through his sundered hulks, The louder the sun blooms And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults.

It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.

If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that.

Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.

It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.

Oh, I'm a martyr to music.

And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels.

Too many of the artists of Wales spend too much time talking about the position of theartists of Wales.There is only one position for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?

And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

Out of the sighs a little comes, But not of grief, for I have knocked down that Before the agony; the spirit grows, Forgets, and cries; A little comes, is tasted and found good.

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.

There is only one po- sition for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.