Quotes from H.D.

I mean how can anything one has suggested in Havre or Rouen, have anything to do with anything else of moment in Paris?

You can take a field and spread it like a rug across the floor and you can step on the field, stepping out of your bed. You can stand on the field and you can watch the mark your foot makes, you can see your foot ringed with blue thyme, or with cyclamen, or with gold pulse. This is imagination. Imagination is stronger than reality.

We are voyagers, discoverers of the not-known, the unrecorded; we have no map; possibly we will reach haven, heaven.

She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.

The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid and visible form was what she had been seeking. I will put this into visible language.

Some plants, some small water creatures give a sort of jellyfish sort of birth by breaking apart, by separating themselves from themselves.

It is easy enough to call men from the edges of the earth. It is easy enough to summon them to my feet with a thought– it is beautiful to see the tall panther and the sleek deer-hounds circle in the dark. It is easy enough to make cedar and white ash fumes into palaces and to cover the sea-caves with ivory and onyx. But I would give up rock-fringes of coral and the inmost chamber of my island palace and my own gifts and the whole region of my power and magic for your glance.

Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of terrible lava, pressure on heart, lungs, the brain about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!)

Nothing held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure.

write, write or die.

I mean seeing the Elgin marbles this morning gave me the same feeling and I didn't know, don't know whether I'm in Rome or Paris. I mean the Louvre and the British Museum hold one together, keep one from going to bits.

Could beauty be caught and hurt they had done her to death with their sneers in ages and ages past, could beauty be sacrificed for a thrust of a sword, for a piece of thin money tossed up to fall half alloy— then beauty were dead long, long before we saw her face.

I am not Undine for Undine or the Little Mermaid sold her glory for feet. Undine (or the Little Mermaid) couldn't speak after she sold her glory. I will not sell my glory.