Quotes from Ted Hughes

So missed everything in the white, blindfolded, rigid faces of those women. I felt their frailty, yes: friable, burnt aluminium. Fragile, like the mantle of a gas-lamp. But made nothing of that massive, starless, mid-fall, falling heaven of granite stopped, as if in a snapshot, by their hair.

But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex And your Saturday night panics, Under your hair done this way and that way, Behind what looked like rebounds And the cascade of cries diminuendo, You were undeflected. You were gold-jacketed, solid silver, Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect As through ether.

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.

Black was the without eye Black the within tongue Black was the heart Black the liver, black the lungs Unable to suck in light Black the blood in its loud tunnel Black the bowels packed in furnace Black too the muscles Striving to pull out into the light Black the nerves, black the brain With its tombed visions Black also the soul, the huge stammer Of the cry that, swelling, could not Pronounce its sun.

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.

We were where we we had never been in our lives. Visitors--visiting even ourselves. The bats were part of the sun's machinery, Connected to the machinery of the flowers By the machinery of insects. The bats' meaning Oiled the unfailing logic of the earth. Cosmic requirement--on the wings of a goblin. A rebuke to our flutter of half-participation... Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us, They knew how, and when, to detach themselves From the love that moves the sun and other stars.

The only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldy enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

Your journal pages. Your effort to cry words

Then everybody wept, Or sat, too exhausted to weep, Or lay, too hurt to weep.

And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

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.

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

Their homeopathic letters, Envelopes full of carefully broken glass To lodge behind your eyes so you would see

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.

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.

And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself What would we do with an unpredictable, Powerful, bounding fox? That long-mouthed, flashing temperament? That necessary nightly twenty miles And that vast hunger for everything beyond us? How would we cope with its cosmic derangements Whenever we moved? ...If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage-- I would not have failed the test.

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.

But red Was what you wrapped around you. Blood red.

And the knowledge Inside the hill on which you are sitting, A moated fort hill, bigger than your house, Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment, Coming towards you like an infantryman Returning slowly out of no-man's-land, Bowed under something, never reached you-- Simply melted into the perfect light.

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.

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

You carried it all, like shards and moults on a tray, To be reassembled In the poem to be written so prettily, And to be worn like a fiesta mask By the daemon that gazed through it As through empty sockets – that still gazes Through it at me.

There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting? The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.

Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business.