Ted Hughes Quotes & Sayings

In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words. — Ted Hughes

Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely. — Ted Hughes

What happened casually remains - — Ted Hughes

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. — Ted Hughes

When I came to consciousness my whole interest was in wild animals. — Ted Hughes

I invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you.
Were you conjuring me? I had no idea
How I was becoming necessary,
Or what emergency surgery Fate would make
Of my casual self-service. — Ted Hughes

You were overloaded. I said nothing.
I said nothing. The stone man made soup.
The burning woman drank it. — Ted Hughes

And maybe a ghost, trying to hear your words,/ Peered from the broken mullions/ And was stilled. Or was suddenly aflame/ With the scorch of doubled envy. Only/ Gradually quenched in understanding. — Ted Hughes

Well, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less.
Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over. It is to the lazy minds that I am now speaking, and from my own experience I imagine this includes nineteen people out of every twenty. I am one of that clan myself and always have been. — Ted Hughes

And that's how we measure out our real respect for people - by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate - and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you. — Ted Hughes

They only want to weep
As after the huge wars
Senseless huge wars
Huge senseless weeping. — Ted Hughes

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is. — Ted Hughes

Where white is black and black is white, I won. — Ted Hughes

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars ... — Ted Hughes

The difference between a fairly interesting writer and a fascinating writer is that the fascinating writer has a better nose for what genuinely excites him, he is hotter on the trail, he has a better instinct for what is truly alive in him. The worse writer may seem to be more sensible in many ways, but he is less sensible in this vital matter: he cannot distinguish what is full of life from what is only half full or empty of it. And so his writing is less alive, and as a writer he is less alive, and in writing, as in everything else, nothing matters but life. — Ted Hughes

The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust. — Ted Hughes

The sea cries with its meaningless voice,
Treating alike its dead and its living — Ted Hughes

So missed everything
in the white, blindfolded, rigid faces
of those women. I felt their frailty, yes:
friable, burnt aluminium.
Fragile, like the mantle of a gas-lamp.
But made nothing
of that massive, starless, mid-fall, falling
heaven of granite
stopped, as if in a snapshot,
by their hair. — Ted Hughes

Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this. — Ted Hughes

You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses. — Ted Hughes

A simple tale, told at the right moment, transforms a person's life with the order its pattern brings to incoherent energies. (Myth and Education) — Ted Hughes

The difficult thing is not to pick up the information but to recognise it - to accept it into our consciousness. Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust. — Ted Hughes

It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems - he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers. — Ted Hughes

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self. — Ted Hughes

Where are the gods
the gods hate us
the gods have run away
the gods have hidden in holes
the gods are dead of the plague
they rot and stink too
there never were any gods
there's only death — Ted Hughes

Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. — Ted Hughes

The wolf is living for the earth. — Ted Hughes

What happens in the heart, simply happens — Ted Hughes

Then everybody wept,
Or sat, too exhausted to weep,
Or lay, too hurt to weep. — Ted Hughes

Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see — Ted Hughes

The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it — Ted Hughes

Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen. Night passed. — Ted Hughes

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is. — Ted Hughes

That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells - he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. — Ted Hughes

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument. — Ted Hughes

What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.
As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late. — Ted Hughes

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come. — Ted Hughes

So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light,
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light. — Ted Hughes

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. — Ted Hughes

In those days I coerced
Oracular assurance
In my favour out of every sign. — Ted Hughes

But the jewel you lost was blue. — Ted Hughes

The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old. — Ted Hughes

Mary is an apple.
Whoever plucks her
Nails his heart
To the leafless tree. — Ted Hughes

So the self under the eye lies,
Attendant and withdrawn. — Ted Hughes

What's writing really about? It's about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life. — Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

- The Thought Fox — Ted Hughes

If you're all so peaceful up there, how did you get such greedy and cruel ideas?"
The dragon was silent for a long time after this question. And at last he said: "It just came over me. I don't know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war-cries of the earth - I got excited, I wanted to join in. — Ted Hughes

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue. — Ted Hughes

And the knowledge
Inside the hill on which you are sitting,
A moated fort hill, bigger than your house,
Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment,
Coming towards you like an infantryman
Returning slowly out of no-man's-land,
Bowed under something, never reached you
Simply melted into the perfect light. — Ted Hughes

The Bush administration doesn't particularly like public participation. It makes them look bad. — Ted Hughes

The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. — Ted Hughes

And if you don't accept my challenge," shouted the Iron Man, "then you're a miserable cowardly reptile, not fit to bother with. — Ted Hughes

Haven't you heard of the music of the spheres?" asked the dragon. "It's the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I'm a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful. — Ted Hughes

And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne. — Ted Hughes

Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give. — Ted Hughes

Now I wanted to show you such a beach
Would set inside your head another jewel,
And lift you like the gentlest electric shock
Into an altogether other England--
An Avalon for which I had the wavelength,
Deep inside my head a little crystal. — Ted Hughes

Some word - from before this translation — Ted Hughes

And you will never know what a battle
I fought to keep the meaning of my words
Solid with the world we were making. — Ted Hughes

Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me. — Ted Hughes

The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic. — Ted Hughes

Even the most misfitting child
Who's chanced upon the library's worth,
Sits with the genius of the Earth
And turns the key to the whole world.
Hear It Again — Ted Hughes

He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of. — Ted Hughes

As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made. — Ted Hughes

CLEOPATRA TO THE ASP

The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it
Loved me like my soul, my soul:
Now that I seek myself in a serpent
My smile is fatal.

Nile moves in me; my thighs splay
Into the squalled Mediterranean;
My brain hides in that Abyssinia
Lost armies foundered towards.

Desert and river unwrinkle again.
Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk
Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.
Now let the snake reign.

A half-deity out of Capricorn,
This rigid Augustus mounts
With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn
Summarily the moon-horned river

From my bed. May the moon
Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole
With coiled Egypt's past; then from my delta
Swim like a fish toward Rome. — Ted Hughes

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature. — Ted Hughes

Applause is the beginning of abuse — Ted Hughes

There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting?
The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule. — Ted Hughes

It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying. — Ted Hughes

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. — Ted Hughes

You said. Or maybe it's ourselves.
This emptiness is sucking something out of us.
Here where there's only death, maybe our life
Is terrifying. Maybe it's the life
In us
Frightening the earth, and frightening us. — Ted Hughes

And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself
What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox?
That long-mouthed, flashing temperament?
That necessary nightly twenty miles
And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?
How would we cope with its cosmic derangements
Whenever we moved?
... If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage
I would not have failed the test. — Ted Hughes

There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish. — Ted Hughes

Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
- from Life After Death — Ted Hughes

There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood. — Ted Hughes

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown. — Ted Hughes

The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system. — Ted Hughes

Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls
Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert
On the flowers of Eden.
God pondered.

The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.

Crow laughed.

He bit the Worm, God's only son,
Into two writhing halves.

He stuffed into man the tail half
With the wounded end hanging out.

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman
And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling it's tail-half to join up quickly, quickly
Because O it was painful.

Man awoke being dragged across the grass.
Woman awoke to see him coming.
Neither knew what had happened.

God went on sleeping.

Crow went on laughing.

- A Childish Prank — Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye. — Ted Hughes

The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness. — Ted Hughes

Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast. — Ted Hughes

Nothing is free. Everything has to be paid for. For every profit in one thing, payment in some other thing. For every life, a death. Even your music, of which we have heard so much, that had to be paid for. Your wife was the payment for your music. Hell is now satisfied. — Ted Hughes

If you were writing a book to be published, you might be restrained by the fear that your wild imaginings might drive some people crazy. As it is, you are free, you can go off in any direction whatsoever, so long as the flame in your mind burns that way. — Ted Hughes

You are who you choose to be. — Ted Hughes

So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.
The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallen
Dream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,
The other face, the real, staring upwards. — Ted Hughes

You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove. — Ted Hughes

There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.
There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.
And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don't somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can't fish. — Ted Hughes

Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly. — Ted Hughes

Wadsworth Moor
Where the millstone of sky
Grinds light and shadow so purple-fine
And has ground it so long
Grinding the skin off the earth
Earth bleeds her raw true darkness
A land naked now as a wound
That the sun swabs and dabs
Where the miles of agony are numbness
And harebell and heather a euphoria — Ted Hughes

The Shell
The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.
You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me. — Ted Hughes

Flowerlike, I loved nothing.

from "Mayday on Holderness — Ted Hughes

With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed. — Ted Hughes

We were where we we had never been in our lives.
Visitors--visiting even ourselves.

The bats were part of the sun's machinery,
Connected to the machinery of the flowers
By the machinery of insects. The bats' meaning

Oiled the unfailing logic of the earth.
Cosmic requirement--on the wings of a goblin.
A rebuke to our flutter of half-participation...

Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,
They knew how, and when, to detach themselves
From the love that moves the sun and other stars. — Ted Hughes

We had sweated the labor, the pilgramige. Now we wanted the blessing. — Ted Hughes

Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
Black the blood in its loud tunnel
Black the bowels packed in furnace
Black too the muscles
Striving to pull out into the light
Black the nerves, black the brain
With its tombed visions
Black also the soul, the huge stammer
Of the cry that, swelling, could not
Pronounce its sun. — Ted Hughes

The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? — Ted Hughes

In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Blood
Who begat Eye
Who begat Fear
Who begat Wing
Who begat Bone
Who begat Granite
Who begat Violet
Who begat Guitar
Who begat Sweat
Who begat Adam
Who begat Mary
Who begat God
Who begat Nothing
Who begat Never
Never Never Never

Who begat Crow

Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything

Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth — Ted Hughes

Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly. — Ted Hughes

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business. — Ted Hughes

But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. — Ted Hughes

But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood red. — Ted Hughes