Geoffrey Hill Quotes

#1. Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century, although his work is by no means either easy or very popular. Dense, intricate, exceedingly compact, his poetry has always had great visionary force.

John Hollander

#2. Public toilets have a duty to be accessible, poetry does not.

Geoffrey Hill

#3. Finally coming to terms with Fathers Day. I blow as a Dad. I get it. No, I'm not an evil, abusive Father, it's just that while all my intentions and thoughts have been out of love for my kids, my actions and behaviour never measured up.

Geoffrey Hill

#4. I want to be like the air. The good-hearted person whose kindness overflows and people realize how important she was to them, once she is gone. I want to be that kind of person.

Aya Kito

#5. I think art has a right - not an obligation - to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic.

Geoffrey Hill

#6. Dig -- the mostly uncouth -- language of grace.

Geoffrey Hill

#7. It doesn't make you feel very good being mean and fierce; it is much nicer playing people who are kind and sweet.

Kristin Scott Thomas

#8. I wouldn't mind dispatching all 3 of my room mates vile felines in this apartment. Nasty beasts. I'm just afraid I wouldn't be able to sell "curiosity" as a serial killer.

Geoffrey Hill

#9. Last days, last things, loom on: I write / to astonish myself. So much for all / plain speaking...

Geoffrey Hill

#10. Even now, I tell myself, there is a language / to which I might speak and which / would rightly hear me ...

Geoffrey Hill

#11. Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
with smoky wings, entangles them.

Geoffrey Hill

#12. That dusty hill we can scarcely look upon and then only with pain, The Adversary, also with pain, does and must ever witness The Crucifixion.

Geoffrey Wood

#13. The Son of God became man so that we might become God.

Athanasius

#14. I just want to feel your heart beating.That's all ...

Rachel Van Dyken

#15. Work for your afterlife as if you will die tomorrow, and work for this life as if you will live forever

Ali Ibn Abi Talib

#16. One of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement.

Geoffrey Hill

#17. September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough.

Geoffrey Hill

#18. As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

Geoffrey Hill

#19. For as His majesty is, so is His mercy.

Anonymous

#20. fierce tea making

in time of war,

Geoffrey Hill

#21. The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me.

Rosa Bonheur

#22. Platonic England, house of solitudes,
rests in its laurels and its injured stone

Geoffrey Hill

#23. A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive.

Pearl Bailey

#24. The closest thing we have to the traditional ideology of the leisure class is a group of artists and intellectuals who regard their work as play and their play as work.

David Riesman

#25. Take accessible to mean / acceptable, accommodating, openly servile.

Geoffrey Hill

#26. Recall the cold
Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn,
Wakefield, Tewkesbury : fastidious trumpets
Shrilling into the ruck ; some trampled
Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,
Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind's
Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.

Geoffrey Hill

#27. Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.

Geoffrey Hill

#28. Thus I grind to conclusion.

Geoffrey Hill

#29. Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..

Geoffrey Hill

#30. Who now would thrust enquiry on / Beyond necessity of desire?

Geoffrey Hill

#31. People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

Brian Reynolds Myers