Dylan Thomas Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

Dylan Thomas
Dylan talked copiously, then stopped. 'Somebody's boring me,' he said, 'I think it's me.'

Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas
I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

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

Dylan Thomas
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns.

Dylan Thomas
The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

Dylan Thomas
This world is half the devil's and my own, Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl and curling round the bud that forks her eye.

Dylan Thomas
Shall I let in the stranger,
Shall I welcome the sailor,
Or stay till the day I die?
Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,
Hold you poison or grapes?

Dylan Thomas
I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.

Dylan Thomas
I said some words to the close and holy darkness and then I slept.

Dylan Thomas
I do not need any friends. I prefer enemies. They are better company and their feelings towards you are always genuine.

Dylan Thomas
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Dylan Thomas
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.

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

Dylan Thomas
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.

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

Dylan Thomas
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.

Dylan Thomas
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels.

Dylan Thomas
When all my five and country senses see,
The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by.

Dylan Thomas
My birthday began with the water - Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name.

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

Dylan Thomas
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways.

Dylan Thomas
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Dylan Thomas
I fell in love — that is the only expression I can think of — at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.

Dylan Thomas
It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.

Dylan Thomas
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?

Dylan Thomas
Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Dylan Thomas
Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

Dylan Thomas