Dylan Thomas Quotes & Sayings

On No Work of Words
On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:
To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.
To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work. — Dylan Thomas

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't. — Dylan Thomas

You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills. And all the people are open and friendly. — Dylan Thomas

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

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. — Dylan Thomas

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling. — Dylan Thomas

Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart; Push in their tides. — Dylan Thomas

A worm tells summer better than the clock,
The slug's a living calendar of days;
What shall it tell me if a timeless insect
Says the world wears away? — Dylan Thomas

And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke. — Dylan Thomas

Hands have not tears to flow. — Dylan Thomas

I love you so much I'll never be able to tell you; I'm frightened to tell you. I can always feel your heart. Dance tunes are always right: I love you body and soul: - and I suppose body means that I want to touch you and be in bed with you, and i suppose soul means that i can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake — Dylan Thomas

We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood. — Dylan Thomas

When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts. — Dylan Thomas

My birthday began with the water -
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name. — Dylan Thomas

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party. — Dylan Thomas

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved/Grave — Dylan Thomas

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith — Dylan Thomas

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me. — Dylan Thomas

I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners. — Dylan Thomas

All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk. — Dylan Thomas

Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas — Dylan Thomas

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest. — Dylan Thomas

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

My tears are like the quiet drift of petals from some magic rose; and all my grief flows from the rift of unremembered skies and snows. I think that if I touched the earth, it would crumble; it is so sad and beautiful, so tremulously like a dream. — Dylan Thomas

Come on up, boys
-I'm dead. — Dylan Thomas

And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you. — Dylan Thomas

But time has set its maggot on their track. — Dylan Thomas

And time cast forth my mortal creature To drift or drown upon the seas Acquainted with the salt adventure Of tides that never touch the shores. I who was rich was made the richer By sipping at the vine of days. — Dylan Thomas

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. — Dylan Thomas

Make gentle the life of this world. — Dylan Thomas

The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs. — Dylan Thomas

The function of posterity is to look after itself. — Dylan Thomas

This is the world: the lying likeness of Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move Loving and being loth; The dream that kicks the buried from their sack And lets their trash be honoured as the quick. This is the world. Have faith. — Dylan Thomas

A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder. — Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer — Dylan Thomas

An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do. — Dylan Thomas

Love drips & gathers,
but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores ...
-Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower. — Dylan Thomas

Man be my metaphor', — Dylan Thomas

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void ... — Dylan Thomas

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain ... — Dylan Thomas

Tell him I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, & in the rot in life. Tell him I am all for cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I'd prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day. Tell him I live exclusively on toenails and rumours. I sleep in a coffin too, and a wormy shroud is my summer suit. — Dylan Thomas

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. — Dylan Thomas

You just wait. I'll sin 'til I blow up! — Dylan Thomas

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. — Dylan Thomas

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize. — Dylan Thomas

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. — Dylan Thomas

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best. — Dylan Thomas

In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought — Dylan Thomas

I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it. — Dylan Thomas

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. — Dylan Thomas

Mr. Kipling stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise. — Dylan Thomas

There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright. — Dylan Thomas

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death! — Dylan Thomas

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed. — Dylan Thomas

Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
Poem on His Birthday — Dylan Thomas

Poetry is not the most important thing in life ... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets. — Dylan Thomas

Before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes. — Dylan Thomas

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't. — Dylan Thomas

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, Would you like anything to read? — Dylan Thomas

I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record. — Dylan Thomas

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

In my Craft or Sullen Art
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
. On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and palms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages, — Dylan Thomas

You must go around the states lecturing to women. And the inoffensive writers who've never dared lecture anyone, let alone women-they are frightened of women, they do not understand women, they write about women as creatures that never existed, — Dylan Thomas

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. — Dylan Thomas

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where's their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You're looking up at me now. I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God? — Dylan Thomas

The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast. — Dylan Thomas

Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words. — Dylan Thomas

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry. — Dylan Thomas

Thousands of miles,' I said. It's Rhosilli, USA. We're going to camp on a bit of rock that wobbles in the winds. — Dylan Thomas

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded. — Dylan Thomas

Call me Dolores. Like they do in the stories. — Dylan Thomas

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

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity. — Dylan Thomas

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle. — Dylan Thomas

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade. — Dylan Thomas

An ugly, lovely town ... crawling, sprawling ... by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world. — Dylan Thomas

Though they go mad they shall be sane, though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion. — Dylan Thomas

I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth. — Dylan Thomas

Rage, rage against the dying light — Dylan Thomas

Man's wants remain unsatisfied till death.
Then, when his soul is naked, is he one
With the man in the wind, and the west moon,
With the harmonious thunder of the sun — Dylan Thomas

I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they've ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn't know, because I won't ever dare ask that question. — Dylan Thomas

Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction. — Dylan Thomas

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. — Dylan Thomas

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

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. — Dylan Thomas

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out. — Dylan Thomas

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

One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women. — Dylan Thomas

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels ... — Dylan Thomas

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay. — Dylan Thomas

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name. — Dylan Thomas

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

And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days ... — Dylan Thomas

I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars. — Dylan Thomas

Raging against the dying of the light - used in The Book of Peach — Dylan Thomas

Swansea is a town where art is alive. If it became a cultural centre or a resort where art was fashionable and where it was always being discussed but never being created, it would be a town where art was dead ... There is no room in Swansea to be pompous without becoming ludicrous, and all the pompous aspects of Swansea are ludicrous; but the town itself, the town of windows between hills and the sea, is unforgettable. What should Swansea become? It should, I think, generate its own species and become what it is now, a town where art is alive. — Dylan Thomas

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression. — Dylan Thomas

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. — Dylan Thomas

And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye! — Dylan Thomas

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