Quotes from Conrad Aiken

How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead, The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

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.

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

One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive.

No god save self, that is the way to live.

Life is the thing--the song of life-- The eager plow, the thirsty knife!

My heart has become as hard as a city street, the horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, all day long and all night long they beat, they ring like the hooves of 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.

Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck-- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.

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

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.

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

The truth--a hideous spectacle!

I love you, what star do you live on?

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.

Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!

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.

Time is a dream ... a destroying dream; It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.

Time is a dream ... a destroying dream; it lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; it covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.

Weeks passed, a whirl of lights and sound and laughter, a fever dream, vertiginous, roaring, mad, he quit his job, not caring what came after, and struck out blindly; money enough he had, and life, by Christ, would go now as he bade; he got it by the throat, he was its master; sing! went his whip, and life danced on the faster.

Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass, through many doors to the one door of all.

Death is one dream out of another flowing.