Dylan Thomas Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood.

Dylan Thomas
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means.

Dylan Thomas
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sunlight And the legend of the green chapels.

Dylan Thomas
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

Dylan Thomas
Too many of the artists of Wales spend too much time talking about the position of the artists of Wales. There is only one position for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

Dylan Thomas
The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water.

Dylan Thomas
You must work at the talent as a sculptor works at stone, chiselling, plotting, rounding, edging & making perfect.

Dylan Thomas
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light.

Dylan Thomas
They dance between their arclamps and our skull, Impose their shots, throwing the nights away. We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill, Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

Dylan Thomas
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.

Dylan Thomas
Youth calls to age across the tired years: 'What have you found,' he cries, 'what have you sought?" 'What have you found,' age answers through his tears, 'What have you sought.

Dylan Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas
Mr Pritchard: I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.
Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

Dylan Thomas
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

Dylan Thomas
Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

Dylan Thomas
What I like to do is to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly-realized truth I must try to reach and realize.

Dylan Thomas
Poetry is not the most important thing in life…I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.

Dylan Thomas
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

Dylan Thomas
Books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.

Dylan Thomas
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?

Dylan Thomas
I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.

Dylan Thomas
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

Dylan Thomas
Chasing the naughty couples down the grassgreen gooseberried double bed of the wood.

Dylan Thomas
I love you so much I'll never be able to tell you; I'm frightened to tell you. I can always feel your heart. Dance tunes are always right: I love you body and soul: —and I suppose body means that I want to touch you and be in bed with you, and i suppose soul means that i can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake

Dylan Thomas
We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood.

Dylan Thomas
Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true "Poem on His Birthday

Dylan Thomas
I am in the path of Blake, but so far behind him that only the wings of his heels are in sight.

Dylan Thomas
Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Dylan Thomas
A poet writing a poem is at peace with everything except words, which are eternal actions; only in the lulls between the warring work on words can he be at war with men.

Dylan Thomas