Ted Hughes Quotes

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  • Poet
  • 1930 - 1998
  • 55 quotes

Ted Hughes, a poet (1930 - 1998), is quoted 55 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are World, Eye, Voice and Stars.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

You are who you choose to be.

What happened casually remains -

The wolf is living for the earth.

Applause is the beginning of abuse

What happens in the heart simply happens.

Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.

Where white is black and black is white, I won.

But who is stronger than death? Me , evidently .

Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen. Night passed.

The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

So the self under the eye lies, Attendant and withdrawn.

Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.

The sea cries with its meaningless voice, Treating alike its dead and its living

There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.

And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of.

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars.

The Bush administration doesn't particularly like public participation. It makes them look bad.

Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.

It took the whole of Creation to produce my foot, my each feather: now I hold Creation in my foot.

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument.

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.

The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.

So we found the end of our journey. So we stood, alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is.

The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust.

The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it

The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess?

With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.

Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast.

The Shell The sea fills my ear with sand and with fear. You may wash out the sand, but never the sound of the ghost of the sea that is haunting me.

You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

where are the gods the gods hate us the gods have run away the gods have hidden in holes the gods are dead of the plague they rot and stink too there never were any gods there’s only death

Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.

He could not stand. It was not That he could not thrive, he was born With everything but the will – That can be deformed, just like a limb. Death was more interesting to him. Life could not get his attention.

As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

Haven’t you heard of the music of the spheres?” asked the dragon. “It’s the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I’m a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.

The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death.

Ted Hughes is quoted on

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