Thomas Dylan Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which / Shall fall awake when cures and their itch / Raise up this red-eyed earth? — Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. — Seamus Heaney

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

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. — Dylan Thomas

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs. — Dylan Thomas

Hands have not tears to flow. — Dylan Thomas

Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. — 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

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don't force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. — Ray Bradbury

If I have to go into that good night, I'm goin' gentle; the hell with whoever said not to. That sucker's dead, man, so what did he know? Not even the courage of his convictions. — George Alec Effinger

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

The arts are obsessional, and obsession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the mind. In some cases - Dylan Thomas comes to mind, and Ross Lockridge and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath - the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it. Art is a localized illness, usually benign - creative people tend to live a long time - sometimes terribly malignant. You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn't care who it cuts. And if you are wise you sift the sludge carefully ... because some of that stuff may not be dead. — Stephen King

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

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon.
She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow.
Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face? — 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

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

In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. 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 psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art. — Dylan Thomas

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe. — Jack Prelutsky

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst. — Randall Jarrell

Sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box. — Dylan Thomas

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin', in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same. — John Thorn

Let the dry eyes perceive
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve. — Dylan Thomas

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

Within the microcosm of a film you get drawn to people. There are certain projects you care enormously about, and 'The Edge Of Love' was one because I was portraying a great hero of mine, Dylan Thomas. — Matthew Rhys

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

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 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

The moment of a miracle is unending lightning ... — 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

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

My parents were inspired by Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas when naming me. They specifically saved this masculine name for their only girl. — Dylan Lauren

If you going to live by a certain code - as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. — Thomas F. Wilson

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

There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die. — Dylan Thomas

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

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

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

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

I tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife. — Carolyn Kizer

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 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

But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything - you wouldn't think that such a place as San Francisco could exist. — Dylan Thomas

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

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

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

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

It's not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don't forget things like that. — Jeffrey Bernard

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

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie. — Dylan Thomas

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. — 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

Please don't worry about me. My suffering is over. In the wise words of Dylan Thomas ... After the first death, there is no other. — Colleen Hoover

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

Dylan Thomas, asked what he thought of Welsh Nationalism, replied in three words, two of which were 'Welsh Nationalism.' — Avram Davidson

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

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

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

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

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

I make one image - though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess - let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. — 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

When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes. — Dylan Thomas

Rage, rage against the dying 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

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. — 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

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samson syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body. — Dylan Thomas

Dylan [Thomas] I knew before and after he became famous. He was splendid, rapacious, demanding as a young man. To much has been written about him for me to add to the legend. As that legend began to grow in his lifetime I learned to separate him from his poetry, to find him in person increasingly tedious and his poems increasingly exciting, both in print and when he was reading them. — John Pudney

Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.
-Dylan Thomas — Victoria Rice

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed. — Katie Roiphe

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While — Fred Waitzkin

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

Love is the last light spoken. — Dylan Thomas

The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth ... — Dylan Thomas

Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted. — 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

By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency. — William Monahan

I'm not Welsh and I didn't know that much about Dylan Thomas , and I saw that he's a huge icon of Welsh-ness. — Tom Hollander

Hemingway reached over and took Elsie's hand. "Do you know Dylan Thomas? I have always admired his take on death. Like he, I intend to go raging against the dying of the light." "Dear, — Homer Hickam

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

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did. — Dylan Walsh

I have been told to reason by the heart,
But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
I have been told to reason by the pulse,
And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace — Dylan Thomas

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story. — Jay McInerney

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

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. — Dylan Thomas