H.D. Quotes

#1. That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day's left dawn for morning.

H.D.

#2. Some plants, some small water creatures give a sort of jellyfish sort of birth by breaking apart, by separating themselves from themselves.

H.D.

#3. Writing. Love is writing.

H.D.

#4. We are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known,
the unrecorded;
we have no map;
possibly we will reach haven,
heaven.

H.D.

#5. We strove for a name,
while the light of the lamps burnt thin
and the outer dawn came in,
a ghost, the last at the feast
or the first,
to sit within
with the two that remained
to quibble in flowers and verse
over a girl's name.

H.D.

#6. She didn't know that all her life would be spent gambling with the stark rigidity of words, words that were coin: save, spend and all the time George with his own counter had found her a way out.

H.D.

#7. I mean seeing the Elgin marbles this morning gave me the same feeling and I didn't know, don't know whether I'm in Rome or Paris. I mean the Louvre and the British Museum hold one together, keep one from going to bits.

H.D.

#8. Could beauty be caught and hurt
they had done her to death with their sneers
in ages and ages past,
could beauty be sacrificed
for a thrust of a sword,
for a piece of thin money
tossed up to fall half alloy
then beauty were dead
long, long before we saw her face.

H.D.

#9. We're incandescent and it doesn't seem fair." "Fair?" "I mean too much comes to some of us, not enought to all the rest of us. So few of us to do the thinking. I mean so few of us have to be so incandescent.

H.D.

#10. O do not weep, she says,
for ages past I was
and I endure

H.D.

#11. She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.

H.D.

#12. Let us not teach / what we have learned badly / and not profited by

H.D.

#13. Hermione looked far and far and George was a midge and a leaf was the size of a house and an acorn-cup would shelter herself ... for ... I am a tree planted by the river of water ... I am in the word tree. I am tree exactly.

H.D.

#14. The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid and visible form was what she had been seeking. I will put this into visible language.

H.D.

#15. I am not Undine for Undine or the Little Mermaid sold her glory for feet. Undine (or the Little Mermaid) couldn't speak after she sold her glory. I will not sell my glory.

H.D.

#16. There's a black rose growing in your garden.

H.D.

#17. Nothing held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure.

H.D.

#18. Remember the golden apple-trees;
O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop
one by one,
for they fall exhausted, numb, blind
but in certain ecstasy,
for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.

H.D.

#19. I will be caught finally, I will be broken. Not broken, incarcerated. Her will be incarcerated in Her.

H.D.

#20. If you do not even understand what words say,
how can you expect to pass judgement
on what words conceal?

H.D.

#21. I watch the white stars darken;
the day comes and the
white stars dim
and lessen
and the lights fade in the city.

H.D.

#22. Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

H.D.

#23. Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,
pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case
(what the skull can endure!)

H.D.

#24. Let us search the old highways.

H.D.

#25. She knew herself the heart of a king buried in a sepulchre (in the land of his love) while the body of the king is elsewhere. My heart lies buried in there like Coeur de Lion (or whoever it was) who had his heart buried at Havre (or wherever it was) and the rest of him buried somewhere else.

H.D.