Quotes from Conrad Aiken

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.

And, growing tired, we turn aside at last, remember our secret selves, seek out our towers, lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb; climbing, each, to his little four-square dream of love or lust or beauty or death or crime.

All that is beautiful, and all that looks on beauty with eyes filled with fire, like a lover's eyes: all of this is yours; you gave it to me, sunlight! all these stars are yours; you gave them to me, skies!

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

My veins are afire with music, her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light; I shall dream to her secret heart tonight.

Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable.

Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain; or else we will tear them down with impatient hands; and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

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

Oh, Poe, yes. I was reading Poe when I was in Savannah, when I was ten, and scaring myself to death. Scaring my brothers and sisters to death, too.

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

A wife? A mistress rather ... he would not wed: that was to stoop in chains, renounce his wings, break body and heart and soul for daily bread, get down and crawl among all crawling things!

Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.

The real thing, this! and all these endless days, these days of senseless drudgery, it was this that set his soul in fever -- in a craze -- to break away, to feel the crushing bliss of life that wars with life -- the seethe and hiss.

Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain! I am dissolved and woven again... Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me. Thousands of voices weave in the rain.

You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.

Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that -- the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death.

The truth--a hideous spectacle!

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

I walk in a cloud of wonder; I am glad. I mingle among the crowds; my heart is pounding; you do not guess the adventure I have had!... Yet you, too, all have had your dark adventures, your sudden adventures, or strange, or sweet.

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.

The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams, the eternal asker of answers, stands in the street, and lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.

Naked then my soul shall feel primal darkness softly steal closer, closer, all about, blotting all the light of living out.