"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."
"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."
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Source: Conrad Aiken (2003). “Selected Poems”, p.37, Oxford University Press
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"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."
"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."
"[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment."
"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."
"MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate, All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, beloved: And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always: They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!"