Famous Quotes & Sayings

Conrad Aiken Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 47 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Conrad Aiken.

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Famous Quotes By Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 605747

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1737491

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1156074

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 326732

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 750195

Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 752944

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 971142

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1921999

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 429654

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 769588

We are the ghosts of the singing furies . — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1982734

Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man,and hold on to your umbrella! Have you got your garters on? Mind your hat! ("Mr. Arcularis") — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 990445

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 2266798

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1233652

I love you, what star do you live on? — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1245529

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1405272

Schoolchildren all over America are told to write to authors-often to authors whom they have never before heard of, whose work they are to young to understand in the least, and often in letters which are almost illiterate. If children are to be taught to respect the work of American poets I think some better way might be found to do so- some way which would not make such an inconsiderate demand on the author's time. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 2257416

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 2251328

You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow
leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1422763

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1568957

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1667431

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! — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1692808

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 2206630

Death is a meeting place of sea and sea. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 2204477

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1766033

Life is the thing
the song of life
The eager plow, the thirsty knife! — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 1856140

Cosmos mariner destination unknown — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 616756

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 113202

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 117630

The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 164755

The truth
a hideous spectacle! — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 181100

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 275563

Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 334830

Music I heard with you was more than music. And bread I broke with you was more than bread. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 364221

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 389679

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 464354

And the mist of snow, as he had foreseen, was still on it - a ghost of snow falling in the bright sunlight, softly and steadily floating and turning and pausing, soundlessly meeting the snow that covered, as with a transparent mirage, the bare bright cobbles. He loved it - he stood still and loved it. Its beauty was paralyzing - beyond all words, all experience, all dream. No fairy-story he had ever read could be compared with it - none had ever given him this extraordinary combination of ethereal loveliness with a something else, unnameable, which was just faintly and deliciously terrifying.
("Silent Snow, Secret Snow") — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 612908

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 950440

I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort
I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form
all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 622981

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 634959

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 702025

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 755646

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 765282

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 769459

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. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 86298

Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes 794658

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

Conrad Aiken Quotes 881465

Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death ... ("Mr. Arcularis") — Conrad Aiken