Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Hilda Doolittle

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a novelist Hilda Doolittle.

Last updated on December 22, 2024.

Hilda Doolittle was an early modernist poet and novelist, essayist, and memoirist who, over a long career, published under the pseudonym H.D.. She became known for her sparse, minimalist, free verse works and association with the 1910s avant-garde Imagist group of poets she co-founded with the American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound and the writer and poet Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913.

Novelist | September 10, 1886 - September 27, 1961

Source: Wikipedia

The Christos-image is most difficult to disentangle from its art-craft junk-shop paint-and-plaster medieval jumble of pain-worship and death-symbol.

Hilda Doolittle

The heart the heart the heart how it thrives on hate.

Hilda Doolittle

You are wind in a stark tree, you are the stark tree unbent, you are a strung bow, you are an arrow.

Hilda Doolittle

Let Love step down, open the clasped hands, forfeit the thorny crown, retrieve the garment that was whole, body and spirit one, spirit and soul.

Hilda Doolittle

No one knows, the heart of a child, how it grows until it is too late.

Hilda Doolittle

One flower may slay the winter and meet death.

Hilda Doolittle

Think of the moment you count most foul in your life; conjure it, supplicate, pray to it; your face is bleak, you retract, you dare not remember it.

Hilda Doolittle

Dance until the earth dance.

Hilda Doolittle

The whole white world is ours.

Hilda Doolittle

When you would think, "what was the use of it," you'll remember something you can't grasp and you'll wonder what it was.

Hilda Doolittle

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

Hilda Doolittle

The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone is yours if you surrender sterile logic, trivial reason.

Hilda Doolittle

Escape from the power of the hunting pack, and to know that wisdom is best and beauty sheer holiness.

Hilda Doolittle

Thoth, Hermes, the stylus, the palette, the pen, the quill endure, though our books are a floor of smouldering ash under our feet.

Hilda Doolittle

Passionate grave thought, belief enhanced, ritual returned and magic.

Hilda Doolittle

Every concrete object has abstract value, is timeless in the dream parallel.

Hilda Doolittle

The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched, I bring thee as offering.

Hilda Doolittle

remember the golden apple-trees; O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one, for they fall exhausted, numb, blind but in certain ecstasy, for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.

Hilda Doolittle

Not God with wine, nor death, nor hate for a cry, but God with a song

Hilda Doolittle

O beautiful white land, olives and wild anemone and violet mingled among the shale, and purple wings of little winter-butterflies say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.

Hilda Doolittle

For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.

Hilda Doolittle

We are these people, wistful, ironical, wilful, who have no part in new-world reconstruction, in the confederacy of labour.

Hilda Doolittle

No one knows the colour of a flower till it is broken.

Hilda Doolittle

Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

Hilda Doolittle

Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.

Hilda Doolittle

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

Hilda Doolittle

There's a black rose growing in your garden.

Hilda Doolittle

I could not accept from wisdom what love taught, woman is perfect.

Hilda Doolittle

That way of inspiration is always open, and open to everyone; it acts as go-between, interpreter, it explains symbols of the past in to-day's imagery.

Hilda Doolittle

O do not weep, she says, for ages past I was and I endure

Hilda Doolittle

I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.

Hilda Doolittle

Alas, day, you brought light, You trailed splendour You showed us god: I salute you, most precious one, But I go to a new place, Another life.

Hilda Doolittle

Dead men would start and move toward me to learn of love.

Hilda Doolittle

But beauty is set apart, beauty is cast by the sea, a barren rock, beauty is set about with wrecks of ships.

Hilda Doolittle

Sing and your hell is heaven, your heaven less hell.

Hilda Doolittle

The race may or may not be to the swift, but tell me, is it likely that the fight will be entrusted to the dead?

Hilda Doolittle

Luminous, unfearful; high-priestesses, our fervour shall banish all evil.

Hilda Doolittle

Music sets up ladders, it makes us invisible, it sets us apart, it lets us escape; but from the visible there is no escape.

Hilda Doolittle

Why wait for Death to mow? why wait for Death to sow us in the ground?

Hilda Doolittle

Cheat me not with time, with the dull ache of flesh, for all flesh turns, even the loveliest ankle and frail thigh, to bitterest dust.

Hilda Doolittle

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!)

Hilda Doolittle

Lift up our eyes to you? no, God, we stare and stare, upon a nearer thing that greets us here, Death, violent and near.

Hilda Doolittle

I had drawn away into the salt, myself, a shell emptied of life.

Hilda Doolittle

No poetic phantasy but a biological reality, a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant or sea-plant cell; I live; I am alive.

Hilda Doolittle

I will be free, no lover's kiss to bind me to earth, no bliss of love to counteract actual bliss.

Hilda Doolittle

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

Hilda Doolittle

I fear no man, no woman; flower does not fear bird, insect nor adder.

Hilda Doolittle

I spit honey out of my mouth: nothing is second-best after the sweet of Eros.

Hilda Doolittle

Love is a garment riven in the light that rises from Parnassus, showing the night is over.

Hilda Doolittle

Writing. Love is writing.

Hilda Doolittle

There is no man can take, there is no pool can slake, ultimately I am alone; ultimately I am done.

Hilda Doolittle

O ruthless, perilous, imperious hate, you can not thwart the promptings of my soul.

Hilda Doolittle

For you are abstract, making no mistake, slurring no word in the rhythm you make, the poem, writ in the air.

Hilda Doolittle

You will not see that desire begets love, until it all flames into one concise and metallic blaze.

Hilda Doolittle

War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod.

Hilda Doolittle

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

Hilda Doolittle

It is no madness to say you will fall, you great cities.

Hilda Doolittle

Could beauty be beaten out, O youth the cities have sent to strike at each other's strength, it is you who have kept her alight.

Hilda Doolittle

The things I have are nameless, old and true; they may not be named; few may live and know.

Hilda Doolittle

We don't have to know,only to be:let go the jumble of worn words,reason and vanity.

Hilda Doolittle

Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Hilda Doolittle

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