Conrad Aiken Quotes

• 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.

  Conrad Aiken

  1823

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

  Conrad Aiken

  "Conrad Aiken, The Art of Poetry No. 9". Interview with Robert Hunter Wilbur in September 1963, "The Paris Review", www.theparisreview.org. Winter - Spring 1968.

  3316

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1961). “Selected Poems”, p.273, Oxford University Press on Demand

  4674

• 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

  Gerald R. Barrett, Thomas L. Erskine, Conrad Aiken (1972). “From fiction to film: Conrad Aiken's Silent snow, secret snow”

  1415

• 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

  1722

• 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.

  Conrad Aiken

  531

• 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

  4983

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

  2202

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

  Conrad Aiken

  Conrad Potter Aiken, “Youth Imperturbable”

  389

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

  Conrad Aiken

  Conrad Aiken (1963). “The morning song of Lord Zero: poems old and new”

  1391

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

  4449

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

  2792

• 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

  Conrad Potter Aiken, “Discordants”

  822

• One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive.

  Conrad Aiken

  3378

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

  687

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1964). “A seizure of limericks”

  3717

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (2003). “Selected Poems”, p.151, Oxford University Press

  2395

• 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

  Conrad Potter Aiken, “Discordants”

  5167

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1918). “The Charnel Rose. Senlin: Biography and Other Poems”, p.57, Ardent Media

  594

• 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

  4503

• 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.

  Conrad Aiken

  725

• I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.

  Conrad Aiken

  2172

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1961). “Selected Poems”, p.273, Oxford University Press on Demand

  1892

• 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

  1196

• I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England.

  Conrad Aiken

  505

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

  5016

• Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

  Conrad Aiken

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

  2595

• Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.

  Conrad Aiken

  4524

• No god save self, that is the way to live.

  Conrad Aiken

  1325

• 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

  Conrad Aiken (1920). “The House of Dust: A Symphony”

  3350

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