Quotes from Hilda Doolittle

I will be free, no lover's kiss to bind me to earth, no bliss of love to counteract actual bliss.

Long hours trail in their purple and long years are lost in just this moment while our souls are near, our mouths separate.

Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.

You will not see that desire begets love, until it all flames into one concise and metallic blaze.

Writing. Love is writing.

You are wind in a stark tree, you are the stark tree unbent, you are a strung bow, you are an arrow.

I spit honey out of my mouth: nothing is second-best after the sweet of Eros.

Love is a garment riven in the light that rises from Parnassus, showing the night is over.

Love has no charm when Love is swept to earth: you'd make a lop-winged god, frozen and contrite, of god up-darting, winged for passionate flight.

Let Love step down, open the clasped hands, forfeit the thorny crown, retrieve the garment that was whole, body and spirit one, spirit and soul.

The whole white world is ours.

When the shingles hissed in the rain incendiary, other values were revealed to us

Why wait for Death to mow? why wait for Death to sow us in the ground?

Lift up our eyes to you? no, God, we stare and stare, upon a nearer thing that greets us here, Death, violent and near.

Love, why have you sought the horde of spearsmen, why the tent Achilles pitched beside the river-ford?

I myself have seen the floating ships And nothing will ever be the same The shouts, The harrowing voices within the house. I stand apart with an army: My mind is graven with ships.

The Greeks have snatched up their spears. They have pointed the helms of their ships Toward the bulwarks of Troy.

War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment; We, we alone, Nereids inviolate, Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant: Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.

I could not accept from wisdom what love taught, woman is perfect.

Dead men would start and move toward me to learn of love.

O do not weep, she says, for ages past I was and I endure

The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.

Ardent yet chill and formal, how I ache to tempt a chisel as a sculptor.

There must be real gods see, the painted gods how fair!