Geoffrey Hill Short Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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I wish I understood myself
more clearly or less well.

Geoffrey Hill

I have learned one thing: not to look down
Too much upon the damned.

Geoffrey Hill

I contrast hierarchy with hegemony, the juxtaposition of the real & surreal

Geoffrey Hill

Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
with smoky wings, entangles them.

Geoffrey Hill

Platonic England, house of solitudes,
rests in its laurels and its injured stone

Geoffrey Hill

Everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence.

Geoffrey Hill

What are poems for? They are to console us
with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Geoffrey Hill

Shakespeare
clearly heard may voices. No secret:
voicing means hearing, at a price a gift

Geoffrey Hill

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

Geoffrey Hill

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

Geoffrey Hill

"One cannot lose what one has not possessed."
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lost what I want. I want you.

Geoffrey Hill

Primroses; salutations; the miry skull
of a half-eaten ram; vicious wonds in earth
opening. What seraphs are afoot.

Geoffrey Hill

An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.

Geoffrey Hill

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

Geoffrey Hill

The years will not
answer for what they have done, that much is
certain. There is no shaking them, we
might have foreseen this but refused.

Geoffrey Hill

Poetry
Unearths from among the speechless dead
Lazarus mystified, common man
Of death. The lily rears its gouged face
From the provided loam.

Geoffrey Hill

I love my work and my children. God
Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.

Geoffrey Hill

I try to make a distinction between enjoyment and joy. You are only prepared to enjoy what you already have a taste for; wheras joy is shocking and surprising.

Geoffrey Hill

The idea that you write to express yourself seems to me revolting. The idea that you write to glorify or to make glorious the art of expressiveness seems to me spot on.

Geoffrey Hill

To say a poet is to be condemned or inaccessible because she invokes some fields of vision which we have difficulty in grasping; this seems to me a crass kind of bullying.

Geoffrey Hill

We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other.

Geoffrey Hill