H.D. Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

I testify
to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven
and walls of colour,
the colonnades of jasper.

H.D.
The elixir of life, the philosopher's stone
is yours if you surrender
sterile logic, trivial reason.

H.D.
(Those women whom the distaff
no longer claims
nor spun cloth)
driven made,
mad,
mad
by Bacchus.

H.D.
Maid
of the luminous grey-eyes,
Mistress
of honey and marble implacable white thighs
and Goddess,
chaste daughter of Zeus.

H.D.
Fall the deep curtains,
delicate the weave,
fair the thread.

H.D.
But beauty is set apart,
beauty is cast by the sea,
a barren rock,
beauty is set about
with wrecks of ships....

H.D.
The laying of fish on the embers, the taste of the fish, the feel of the texture of bread, the round and the half-loaf, the grain of a petal, the rain-bow and the rain.

H.D.
I could not accept from wisdom
what love taught,
woman is perfect.

H.D.
No man will be present in those mysteries,
yet all men will kneel,
no man will be potent,
important,
yet all men will feel
what it is to be a woman.

H.D.
I had drawn away into the salt,
myself, a shell
emptied of life.

H.D.
The things I have
are nameless,
old and true;
they may not be named;
few may live and know.

H.D.
Ardent
yet chill and formal,
how I ache
to tempt a chisel
as a sculptor.

H.D.
Take what the old-church
found in Mithra's tomb,
candle and script and bell,
take what the new-church spat upon
and broke and shattered.

H.D.
That way of inspiration
is always open,
and open to everyone;
it acts as go-between, interpreter,
it explains symbols of the past
in to-day's imagery.

H.D.
You will not see
that desire begets
love,
until it all flames
into one concise
and metallic blaze.

H.D.
Love, why have you sought the horde
of spearsmen, why the tent
Achilles pitched beside the river-ford?

H.D.
Lift up our eyes to you?
no, God, we stare and stare,
upon a nearer thing
that greets us here,
Death, violent and near.

H.D.
I will be free,
no lover's kiss
to bind me to earth,
no bliss of love
to counteract
actual bliss.

H.D.
No poetic phantasy
but a biological reality,
a fact: I am an entity
like bird, insect, plant
or sea-plant cell;
I live; I am alive.

H.D.
A slight wind shakes the seed-pods
my thoughts are spent
as the black seeds.

H.D.
Love that I bear
within my breast
how is my armour melted
how my heart

H.D.
Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

H.D.
Long hours
trail in their purple
and long years are lost
in just this moment
while our souls are near,
our mouths separate.

H.D.
Thoth, Hermes, the stylus,
the palette, the pen, the quill endure,
though our books are a floor
of smouldering ash under our feet.

H.D.
No one knows,
the heart of a child,
how it grows
until it is too late.

H.D.
Could beauty be beaten out,
O youth the cities have sent
to strike at each other's strength,
it is you who have kept her alight.

H.D.
The stallion and his mare,
unbridled, with arrow-pattern,
are worked on.
the blue cloth
before the door
of religion and inspiration....

H.D.
O ruthless, perilous, imperious hate,
you can not thwart
the promptings of my soul.

H.D.
Every concrete object
has abstract value, is timeless
in the dream parallel.

H.D.
Passionate grave thought,
belief enhanced,
ritual returned and magic.

H.D.