Hilda Doolittle Quotes - Page 2

Sing and your hell is heaven, your heaven less hell.

Luminous, unfearful; high-priestesses, our fervour shall banish all evil.

I fear no man, no woman; flower does not fear bird, insect nor adder.

But beauty is set apart, beauty is cast by the sea, a barren rock, beauty is set about with wrecks of ships.

The whole white world is ours.

O do not weep, she says, for ages past I was and I endure

The things I have are nameless, old and true; they may not be named; few may live and know.

Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

Let Love step down, open the clasped hands, forfeit the thorny crown, retrieve the garment that was whole, body and spirit one, spirit and soul.

Think of the moment you count most foul in your life; conjure it, supplicate, pray to it; your face is bleak, you retract, you dare not remember it.

Alas, day, you brought light, You trailed splendour You showed us god: I salute you, most precious one, But I go to a new place, Another life.

For you are abstract, making no mistake, slurring no word in the rhythm you make, the poem, writ in the air.

Music sets up ladders, it makes us invisible, it sets us apart, it lets us escape; but from the visible there is no escape.

The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.

Escape from the power of the hunting pack, and to know that wisdom is best and beauty sheer holiness.

Why wait for Death to mow? why wait for Death to sow us in the ground?

Cheat me not with time, with the dull ache of flesh, for all flesh turns, even the loveliest ankle and frail thigh, to bitterest dust.

There's a black rose growing in your garden.

O ruthless, perilous, imperious hate, you can not thwart the promptings of my soul.

She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.

Dead men would start and move toward me to learn of love.

There is no man can take, there is no pool can slake, ultimately I am alone; ultimately I am done.

The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched, I bring thee as offering.

I spit honey out of my mouth: nothing is second-best after the sweet of Eros.

War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod.