Hilda Doolittle Quotes

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.

In my garden the winds have beaten the ripe lilies; in my garden, the salt has wilted the first flakes of young narcissus.

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

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

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.

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

Dance until the earth dance.

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

One flower may slay the winter and meet death.

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

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

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

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.

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

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

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.

Until it seems the whole city will be covered with gold pollen shaken from the bell-towers, lilies plundered with the weight of massive bees . . .

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

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!)

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

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

Writing. Love is writing.

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

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

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

The stallion and his mare, unbridled, with arrow-pattern, are worked on. the blue cloth before the door of religion and inspiration.

When the shingles hissed in the rain incendiary, other values were revealed to us

I knew the poor, I knew the hideous death they die, when famine lays its bleak hand on the door; I knew the rich, sated with merriment, who yet are sad.

There's a black rose growing in your garden.

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

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

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.

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

Light threatens, is active, is gone, so it is with a song.

The laying of fish on the embers, the taste of the fish, the feel of the texture of bread, the round and the half-loaf, the grain of a petal, the rain-bow and the rain.

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

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

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

I testify to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven and walls of colour, the colonnades of jasper.

O happy, happy each man whom predestined fate leads to the holy rite of hill and mountain worship.

Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.

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

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.

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.

My eye-balls are glass, my limbs marble, my face fixed in its marble mask.

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.

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

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

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

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