Quotes from Dylan Thomas

There shall be corals in your beds, There shall be serpents in your tides, Till all our sea-faiths die.

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?

This world is half the devil's and my own, / Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl / And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes. Come closer now. Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women.

The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast.

Wales: The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it!

And I rose In a rainy autumn And walked abroad in shower of all my days High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke.

Tell him I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, & in the rot in life. Tell him I am all for cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I'd prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day. Tell him I live exclusively on toenails and rumours. I sleep in a coffin too, and a wormy shroud is my summer suit.

the sloeback, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat bobbing sea

Call me Dolores. Like they do in the stories.

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samson syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug's a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved/Grave

Great is the hand that holds dominion over Man by a scribbled name.

The only surprising thing about miracles, however small, is that they sometimes happen.

My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

I'll tell you no lies. The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which / Shall fall awake when cures and their itch / Raise up this red-eyed earth?

Fear not the waking world, my mortal, Fear not the flat, synthetic blood, Nor the heart in the ribbing metal. Fear not the tread, the seeded milling, The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade, Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.