Conrad Aiken famous quotes

[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Music #Enchantment #Concerts

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Moving #Sleep #Snow

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead, The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
-- Conrad Aiken

#Men #Modesty #Praise

Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust, The horns of glory blowing above my burial?
-- Conrad Aiken

#Death #Lying #Glory

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Time #Heart #Rhetoric

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Morning #Darkness #Wounds

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Done #Glorify

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Love #Hate #Ridiculous

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Music #Beautiful #Bread

The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Dream #Lying #Dark

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!
-- Conrad Aiken

#Beautiful #Wise #Blessed

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Sweet #Heart #Eye

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Stars #Wall #Rain

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Moving #Fall #Autumn

It's time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Stars #Lying #Firefly

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Beautiful #Dream #Strange

Time is a dream ... a destroying dream; It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Dream #Time #Wall

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Being Alone

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Lovely #Pennies #Youth

I love you, what star do you live on?
-- Conrad Aiken

#I Love You #Stars #Love You

We are the ghosts of the singing furies .
-- Conrad Aiken

#Singing #Ghost #Fury

One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Self #Sometimes

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing -- to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos -- of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings -- in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, "This is I!
-- Conrad Aiken

#Memories #Writing #Feelings

My heart has become as hard as a city street, the horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, all day long and all night long they beat, they ring like the hooves of time.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Horse #Heart #Night

Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Thinking #Years #Profound

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Dream #Rain #Answers

O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best beloved and I, close well above us, that we may rest forever, sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Sweet #Sky #Forever

The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Wall #Sleep #Night

The wind shrieks, the wind grieves; It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again; And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Dream #Wall #Pain

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Morning #Yellow #Balls

Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain; or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Rain #Fall #Rocks

All that is beautiful, and all that looks on beauty with eyes filled with fire, like a lover's eyes: all of this is yours; you gave it to me, sunlight! all these stars are yours; you gave them to me, skies!
-- Conrad Aiken

#Beautiful #Stars #Eye

He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Work #Views #Firsts

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Pain #Lying #Roots

Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Death #Sea #Meetings

Death is one dream out of another flowing.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Death #Dream

No god save self, that is the way to live ...
-- Conrad Aiken

#God #Self #Way

Life is the thing--the song of life-- The eager plow, the thirsty knife!
-- Conrad Aiken

#Life #Song #Knives

The truth--a hideous spectacle!
-- Conrad Aiken

#Truth

You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Running #Spring #Lying

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.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Writing #Mean #Exercise

Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Blood #Youth

Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!
-- Conrad Aiken

#Men #Umbrella #Old Man

For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.
-- Conrad Aiken

#Self #Profound #Encounters