Top 39 Conrad Aiken Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. No god save self, that is the way to live ...
Conrad Aiken
#4. One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive.
Conrad Aiken
#5. [At a musical concert:] ... the music's pure algebra of enchantment.
Conrad Aiken
#6. Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death ... ("Mr. Arcularis")
Conrad Aiken
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
Conrad Aiken
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.
Conrad Aiken
#17. Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.
Conrad Aiken
#18. 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
#19. Music I heard with you was more than music. And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Conrad Aiken
#20. Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
Conrad Aiken
#21. 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
#22. 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
#25. Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again.
Conrad Aiken
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial?
Conrad Aiken
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man,and hold on to your umbrella! Have you got your garters on? Mind your hat! ("Mr. Arcularis")
Conrad Aiken
#32. 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
#34. The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.
Conrad Aiken
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Life is the thing
the song of life
The eager plow, the thirsty knife!
Conrad Aiken
#38. 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
#39. For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.
Conrad Aiken
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