Quotes from Geoffrey Hill

Public toilets have a duty to be accessible, poetry does not.

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,To ravage and redeem the world:There is no bloodless myth will hold.

Finally coming to terms with Fathers Day. I blow as a Dad. I get it. No, I'm not an evil, abusive Father, it's just that while all my intentions and thoughts have been out of love for my kids, my actions and behaviour never measured up.

If we meet each other in hell, it's not hell.

Evil is not good's absence but gravity's everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.

Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..

In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together.

It is not faithless to stand without faith, keeping open vigil at the site

Dig -- the mostly uncouth -- language of grace.

I wouldn't mind dispatching all 3 of my room mates vile felines in this apartment. Nasty beasts. I'm just afraid I wouldn't be able to sell "curiosity" as a serial killer.

The risen Christ! Once more faith is upon us, a jubilant brief keening with respite: Obedience, bitter joy, the elements, clouds, winds, louvres where the bell makes its wild mouths: Holy Rus – into the rain's horizons, peacock-dyed tail feathers of storm, so it goes on.

Take accessible to mean / acceptable, accommodating, openly servile.

Recall the cold Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn, Wakefield, Tewkesbury : fastidious trumpets Shrilling into the ruck ; some trampled Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind's Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.

Last days, last things, loom on: I write / to astonish myself. So much for all / plain speaking...

Even now, I tell myself, there is a language / to which I might speak and which / would rightly hear me...

I saw the angels lifted like pale straws; I could not stand before those winnowing eyes. And fell, until I found the world again. Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen; For though the head frames words the tongue has none. And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?

Tragedy takes all under regard.

Everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence." —Geoffrey Hill

Who now would thrust enquiry on / Beyond necessity of desire?

Innocence is no earthly weapon.

fierce tea making in time of war,

This half-puzzled, awkward surprise is yours; you cannot hear me or quite make me out. Formalities preserve us: perhaps I too am a shade.

As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries.