Wilfred Owen Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Wilfred Owen
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

Wilfred Owen
After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

Wilfred Owen
I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?

Wilfred Owen
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's

Wilfred Owen
The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

Wilfred Owen
Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.

Wilfred Owen
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
'My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Wilfred Owen
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

Wilfred Owen
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.

Wilfred Owen
The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Wilfred Owen
The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have ended up in hospital. We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death.

Wilfred Owen
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen
The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.

Wilfred Owen
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for you so frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed…
Let us sleep now.

Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

Wilfred Owen
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Wilfred Owen
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling

Wilfred Owen
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also.'

Wilfred Owen
I have perceived much beauty
In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
Heard music in the silentness of duty;
Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Wilfred Owen
My soul's a little grief, grappling your chest,
To climb your throat on sobs; easily chased
On other sighs and wiped by fresher winds.

Wilfred Owen
Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,
But here the thing's best left at home with friends.

Wilfred Owen
I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.

Wilfred Owen
I, too, saw God through mud - The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Wilfred Owen
Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot

Wilfred Owen
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping may something have been left,
Which must die now.

Wilfred Owen
And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,
Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

Wilfred Owen
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned:
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.

Wilfred Owen