Hilda Doolittle Quotes

The heart the heart the heart how it thrives on hate.

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

One flower may slay the winter and meet death.

We are voyagers, discoverers of the not-known, the unrecorded; we have no map; possibly we will reach haven, heaven.

The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone is yours if you surrender sterile logic, trivial reason.

The quivering of Psyche's butterflies.

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

No poetic phantasy but a biological reality, a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant or sea-plant cell; I live; I am alive.

For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.

Every concrete object has abstract value, is timeless in the dream parallel.

Dance until the earth dance.

I will be free, no lover's kiss to bind me to earth, no bliss of love to counteract actual bliss.

We don't have to know,only to be:let go the jumble of worn words,reason and vanity.

No one knows the colour of a flower till it is broken.

Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.

That way of inspiration is always open, and open to everyone; it acts as go-between, interpreter, it explains symbols of the past in to-day's imagery.

You are wind in a stark tree, you are the stark tree unbent, you are a strung bow, you are an arrow.

Writing. Love is writing.

It is no madness to say you will fall, you great cities.

No one knows, the heart of a child, how it grows until it is too late.

O beautiful white land, olives and wild anemone and violet mingled among the shale, and purple wings of little winter-butterflies say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.

I could not accept from wisdom what love taught, woman is perfect.

Thoth, Hermes, the stylus, the palette, the pen, the quill endure, though our books are a floor of smouldering ash under our feet.

I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.

You will not see that desire begets love, until it all flames into one concise and metallic blaze.