"The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams."
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Quote collection
Conrad Aiken quotes (page 2 of 3)
57 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office."
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"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."
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"Life is the thing--the song of life-- The eager plow, the thirsty knife!"
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"How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead, The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?"
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"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."
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"We are the ghosts of the singing furies ."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing."
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"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."
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"I think there's an enormous lot of talent around, and somewhere amongst these I'm sure that something will emerge, given time."
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"I always hankered to be a composer - I was mad about music, though I never studied seriously, and can't read a note. But I learned to play the piano and became pretty skillful at improvisation, especially after a drop or two."
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"I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England."
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"I think it's very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself."
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"I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It's simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe."
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"I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry."
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"I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction."
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"I think we've come to a kind of splinter period in poetry. These tiny little bright fragments of observation - and not produced under sufficient pressure - some of it's very skillful, but I don't think there's anywhere a discernible major poet in the process of emerging; or if he is, I ain't seen him."
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