Top 138 Quotes & Sayings by Dylan Thomas - Page 2

A good poem is a contribution to reality.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Join the army and see the next world.

I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.

Too many of the artists of Wales spend too much time talking about the position of theartists of Wales.There is only one position for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

The closer I move To death, one man through his sundered hulks, The louder the sun blooms And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults.

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.

Oh, I'm a martyr to music.

And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion.

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels.

To begin, at the beginning.

I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.

It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.

The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

After the first death, there is no other.

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.

Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?

And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?

When logics die, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder.

Rage, rage against the dying light

But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything - you wouldn't think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bend by the same wintry fever.

I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.

Out of the sighs a little comes, But not of grief, for I have knocked down that Before the agony; the spirit grows, Forgets, and cries; A little comes, is tasted and found good.

A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug's a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away?

The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.

Hands have not tears to flow.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

The moment of a miracle is unending lightning.

Seventeen whiskeys. A record, I think.

I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.

... Rebel against the flesh and bone, The word of the blood, the wily skin, And the maggot no man can slay.

Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.

Sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.

You just wait. I'll sin 'til I blow up!

And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret; The code of night tapped on my tongue; What had been one was many sounding minded.

A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in.

Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true "Poem on His Birthday

Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas

I sang in my chains like the sea

I have been told to reason by the heart, But heart, like head, leads helplessly; I have been told to reason by the pulse, And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace

There is only one po- sition for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where's their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You're looking up at me now. I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?

The photograph is married to the eye, Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth.