Top 76 Ted Hughes Quotes
#1. In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.
Ted Hughes
#2. They only want to weep
As after the huge wars
Senseless huge wars
Huge senseless weeping.
Ted Hughes
#3. He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of.
Ted Hughes
#4. The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.
Ted Hughes
#5. Now I wanted to show you such a beach
Would set inside your head another jewel,
And lift you like the gentlest electric shock
Into an altogether other England--
An Avalon for which I had the wavelength,
Deep inside my head a little crystal.
Ted Hughes
#7. Haven't you heard of the music of the spheres?" asked the dragon. "It's the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I'm a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.
Ted Hughes
#8. I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
Ted Hughes
#9. There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.
Ted Hughes
#10. Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
- from Life After Death
Ted Hughes
#12. Then everybody wept,
Or sat, too exhausted to weep,
Or lay, too hurt to weep.
Ted Hughes
#13. Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see
Ted Hughes
#14. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot.
Ted Hughes
#15. So the self under the eye lies,
Attendant and withdrawn.
Ted Hughes
#16. And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.
Ted Hughes
#17. Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen. Night passed.
Ted Hughes
#18. The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument.
Ted Hughes
#19. So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.
The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallen
Dream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,
The other face, the real, staring upwards.
Ted Hughes
#20. I invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you.
Were you conjuring me? I had no idea
How I was becoming necessary,
Or what emergency surgery Fate would make
Of my casual self-service.
Ted Hughes
#21. And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.
Ted Hughes
#22. Some word - from before this translation
Ted Hughes
#23. The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.
Ted Hughes
#24. Applause is the beginning of abuse
Ted Hughes
#25. Nothing is free. Everything has to be paid for. For every profit in one thing, payment in some other thing. For every life, a death. Even your music, of which we have heard so much, that had to be paid for. Your wife was the payment for your music. Hell is now satisfied.
Ted Hughes
#26. But who is stronger than death? Me , evidently .
Ted Hughes
#27. Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give.
Ted Hughes
#28. I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars ...
Ted Hughes
#29. You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
Ted Hughes
#30. As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.
Ted Hughes
#31. Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.
Ted Hughes
#32. With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.
Ted Hughes
#33. You were overloaded. I said nothing.
I said nothing. The stone man made soup.
The burning woman drank it.
Ted Hughes
#34. What's writing really about? It's about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
Ted Hughes
#35. Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast.
Ted Hughes
#36. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.
Ted Hughes
#37. Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business.
Ted Hughes
#38. Flowerlike, I loved nothing.
from "Mayday on Holderness
Ted Hughes
#39. The Shell
The sea fills my ear
with sand and with fear.
You may wash out the sand,
but never the sound
of the ghost of the sea
that is haunting me.
Ted Hughes
#40. The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust.
Ted Hughes
#41. It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems - he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.
Ted Hughes
#42. Even the most misfitting child
Who's chanced upon the library's worth,
Sits with the genius of the Earth
And turns the key to the whole world.
Hear It Again
Ted Hughes
#43. What happens in the heart, simply happens
Ted Hughes
#44. A simple tale, told at the right moment, transforms a person's life with the order its pattern brings to incoherent energies. (Myth and Education)
Ted Hughes
#45. In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words.
Ted Hughes
#47. The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.
Ted Hughes
#48. Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.
Ted Hughes
#49. The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old.
Ted Hughes
#50. Mary is an apple.
Whoever plucks her
Nails his heart
To the leafless tree.
Ted Hughes
#51. The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it
Ted Hughes
#52. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess?
Ted Hughes
#53. Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.
Ted Hughes
#54. The Bush administration doesn't particularly like public participation. It makes them look bad.
Ted Hughes
#55. Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.
Ted Hughes
#56. In those days I coerced
Oracular assurance
In my favour out of every sign.
Ted Hughes
#57. And if you don't accept my challenge," shouted the Iron Man, "then you're a miserable cowardly reptile, not fit to bother with.
Ted Hughes
#58. We had sweated the labor, the pilgramige. Now we wanted the blessing.
Ted Hughes
#59. And maybe a ghost, trying to hear your words,/ Peered from the broken mullions/ And was stilled. Or was suddenly aflame/ With the scorch of doubled envy. Only/ Gradually quenched in understanding.
Ted Hughes
#60. Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
Ted Hughes
#61. If you were writing a book to be published, you might be restrained by the fear that your wild imaginings might drive some people crazy. As it is, you are free, you can go off in any direction whatsoever, so long as the flame in your mind burns that way.
Ted Hughes
#62. The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.
Ted Hughes
#63. And you will never know what a battle
I fought to keep the meaning of my words
Solid with the world we were making.
Ted Hughes
#64. You said. Or maybe it's ourselves.
This emptiness is sucking something out of us.
Here where there's only death, maybe our life
Is terrifying. Maybe it's the life
In us
Frightening the earth, and frightening us.
Ted Hughes
#65. Where white is black and black is white, I won.
Ted Hughes
#66. The sea cries with its meaningless voice,
Treating alike its dead and its living
Ted Hughes
#67. So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light,
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.
Ted Hughes
#68. When I came to consciousness my whole interest was in wild animals.
Ted Hughes
#69. In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.
Ted Hughes
#70. To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying
Ted Hughes
#71. Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.
Ted Hughes
#72. You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove.
Ted Hughes
#74. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood red.
Ted Hughes
#75. Where are the gods
the gods hate us
the gods have run away
the gods have hidden in holes
the gods are dead of the plague
they rot and stink too
there never were any gods
there's only death
Ted Hughes
#76. The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.
Ted Hughes
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