Dylan Thomas Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

Dylan Thomas
Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?

Dylan Thomas
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

Dylan Thomas
Especially when the October wind With frosty fingers punishes my hair, Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire And cast a shadow crab upon the land, By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds, Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks, My busy heart who shudders as she talks Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Dylan Thomas
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

Dylan Thomas
On being asked why he had traveled to America:
In pursuit of my life-long quest for naked women in wet mackintoshes.

Dylan Thomas
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Dylan Thomas
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Dylan Thomas
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Dylan Thomas
Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Dylan Thomas
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