Conrad Aiken Quotes

I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.

I think it's very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself.

I've tried it long ago, with hashish and peyote. Fascinating, yes, but no good, no. This, as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it.

I love you, what star do you live on?

Schoolchildren all over America are told to write to authors-often to authors whom they have never before heard of, whose work they are to young to understand in the least, and often in letters which are almost illiterate. If children are to be taught to respect the work of American poets I think some better way might be found to do so- some way which would not make such an inconsiderate demand on the author's time.

Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.

MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate, All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, beloved: And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always: They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

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.

I think we've come to a kind of splinter period in poetry. These tiny little bright fragments of observation - and not produced under sufficient pressure - some of it's very skillful, but I don't think there's anywhere a discernible major poet in the process of emerging; or if he is, I ain't seen him.

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.

Variations: II Green light, from the moon, Pours over the dark blue trees, Green light from the autumn moon Pours on the grass ... Green light falls on the goblin fountain Where hesitant lovers meet and pass. They laugh in the moonlight, touching hands, They move like leaves on the wind ... I remember an autumn night like this, And not so long ago, When other lovers were blown like leaves, Before the coming of snow.

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a student, but my casual reading was enormous.

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.

I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.

I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It's simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe.

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.

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

We are the ghosts of the singing furies .

I think that what's happening today, with all the young poets rushing from one college to another, lecturing at the drop of a hat and so on, is not too good; I think it might have a bad effect on a great many of the young poets. They - to quote Mark Twain - "swap juices" a little too much, so that they are in danger of losing their own identity and don't give themselves time enough in which to work out what's really of importance to them - they're too busy.

For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.

I always hankered to be a composer - I was mad about music, though I never studied seriously, and can't read a note. But I learned to play the piano and became pretty skillful at improvisation, especially after a drop or two.

The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.

I think there's an enormous lot of talent around, and somewhere amongst these I'm sure that something will emerge, given time.

I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England.

It is moonlight. Alone in the silence I ascend my stairs once more, While waves remote in pale blue starlight Crash on a white sand shore. It is moonlight. The garden is silent. I stand in my room alone. Across my wall, from the far-off moon, A rain of fire is thrown. There are houses hanging above the stars, And stars hung under the sea, And a wind from the long blue vault of time Waves my curtains for me. I wait in the dark once more, swung between space and space: Before the mirror I lift my hands And face my remembered face.

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.