Top 100 Dylan Thomas Quotes
#1. Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Dylan Thomas
#2. And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.
Dylan Thomas
#3. Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
Poem on His Birthday
Dylan Thomas
#4. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer
Dylan Thomas
#5. Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels ...
Dylan Thomas
#6. I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.
Dylan Thomas
#7. I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.
Dylan Thomas
#8. Out of the sighs a little comes,
But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good ...
Dylan Thomas
#9. A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in.
Dylan Thomas
#10. Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.
Dylan Thomas
#11. But time has set its maggot on their track.
Dylan Thomas
#12. And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
Dylan Thomas
#14. Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart; Push in their tides.
Dylan Thomas
#15. Mr. Kipling stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.
Dylan Thomas
#16. The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.
Dylan Thomas
#17. I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.
Dylan Thomas
#18. An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do.
Dylan Thomas
#19. I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they've ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn't know, because I won't ever dare ask that question.
Dylan Thomas
#21. I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.
Dylan Thomas
#22. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder.
Dylan Thomas
#23. It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
Dylan Thomas
#24. There is only one position for an artist anywhere; and that is upright.
Dylan Thomas
#25. Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which / Shall fall awake when cures and their itch / Raise up this red-eyed earth?
Dylan Thomas
#26. And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.
Dylan Thomas
#28. Love drips & gathers,
but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores ...
-Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
Dylan Thomas
#29. The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith
Dylan Thomas
#30. But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything - you wouldn't think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.
Dylan Thomas
#31. Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.
Dylan Thomas
#32. We are not wholly bad or good, who live our lives under Milk Wood.
Dylan Thomas
#33. Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved/Grave
Dylan Thomas
#34. These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.
Dylan Thomas
#35. This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.
Dylan Thomas
#36. Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.
Dylan Thomas
#37. All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
Dylan Thomas
#38. In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Dylan Thomas
#39. The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
Dylan Thomas
#40. Let the dry eyes perceive
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.
Dylan Thomas
#41. When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.
Dylan Thomas
#43. If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that.
Dylan Thomas
#44. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.
Dylan Thomas
#45. When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
Dylan Thomas
#46. Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.
Dylan Thomas
#47. Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
Dylan Thomas
#48. My tears are like the quiet drift of petals from some magic rose; and all my grief flows from the rift of unremembered skies and snows. I think that if I touched the earth, it would crumble; it is so sad and beautiful, so tremulously like a dream.
Dylan Thomas
#50. My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.
Dylan Thomas
#51. I love you more than anybody in the world ... I love you for millions and millions of things, clocks and vampires and dirty nails and squiggly paintings and lovely hair and being dizzy and falling dreams.
Dylan Thomas
#52. In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void ...
Dylan Thomas
#53. Speak, then, o body, shout aloud, And break my only mind from chains To go where ploughing's ended.
Dylan Thomas
#54. This world is half the devil's and my own, / Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl / And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
Dylan Thomas
#55. And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye!
Dylan Thomas
#56. Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon.
She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow.
Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?
Dylan Thomas
#57. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
Dylan Thomas
#58. This is the world: the lying likeness of Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move Loving and being loth; The dream that kicks the buried from their sack And lets their trash be honoured as the quick. This is the world. Have faith.
Dylan Thomas
#59. Man's wants remain unsatisfied till death.
Then, when his soul is naked, is he one
With the man in the wind, and the west moon,
With the harmonious thunder of the sun
Dylan Thomas
#60. All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.
Dylan Thomas
#61. This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
Dylan Thomas
#62. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
Dylan Thomas
#63. The moment of a miracle is unending lightning ...
Dylan Thomas
#64. There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die.
Dylan Thomas
#65. Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.
Dylan Thomas
#66. I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.
Dylan Thomas
#67. Call me Dolores. Like they do in the stories.
Dylan Thomas
#68. Shall I let in the stranger,
Shall I welcome the sailor,
Or stay till the day I die?
Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,
Hold you poison or grapes?
Dylan Thomas
#69. My birthday began with the water -
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name.
Dylan Thomas
#70. One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women.
Dylan Thomas
#71. Poetry is not the most important thing in life ... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
Dylan Thomas
#72. Wales: The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it!
Dylan Thomas
#75. Why do men think you can pick love up and re-light it like a candle? Women know when love is over.
Dylan Thomas
#76. Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.
Dylan Thomas
#78. The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth ...
Dylan Thomas
#79. I hold a beast, an angel and a madman within me.
Dylan Thomas
#80. Raging against the dying of the light - used in The Book of Peach
Dylan Thomas
#81. The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.
Dylan Thomas
#82. Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.
Dylan Thomas
#84. To begin at the beginning: It is a spring moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.
Dylan Thomas
#85. And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain ...
Dylan Thomas
#86. I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.
Dylan Thomas
#87. It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.
Dylan Thomas
#88. Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.
Dylan Thomas
#89. These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.
Dylan Thomas
#90. Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.
Dylan Thomas
#92. The closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults ...
Dylan Thomas
#93. Thousands of miles,' I said. It's Rhosilli, USA. We're going to camp on a bit of rock that wobbles in the winds.
Dylan Thomas
#94. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.
Dylan Thomas
#95. Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.
Dylan Thomas
#96. The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast.
Dylan Thomas
#97. Rebel against the flesh and bone,
The word of the blood, the wily skin,
And the maggot no man can slay.
Dylan Thomas
#98. I have been told to reason by the heart,
But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
I have been told to reason by the pulse,
And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace
Dylan Thomas
#99. An ugly, lovely town ... crawling, sprawling ... by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world.
Dylan Thomas
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