H.D. Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

Ah love is bitter and sweet,
but which is more sweet
the bitterness or the sweetness,
none has spoken it.

H.D.
Who dreams of a son,
save one,
childless, having no bright
face to flatter its own,
who dreams of a son?

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

H.D.
Escape
from the power of the hunting pack,
and to know that wisdom is best
and beauty
sheer holiness.

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

H.D.
I knew the poor,
I knew the hideous death they die,
when famine lays its bleak hand on the door;
I knew the rich,
sated with merriment,
who yet are sad.

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.
I fear no man, no woman;
flower does not fear
bird, insect nor adder.

H.D.
O, give me burning blue
and brittle burnt sea-weed above the tide-line,
as I stand, still unsatisfied,
under the long shadow-on-snow of the pine.

H.D.
The Christos-image
is most difficult to disentangle
from its art-craft junk-shop
paint-and-plaster medieval jumble
of pain-worship and death-symbol.

H.D.
Love is a garment
riven in the light
that rises from Parnassus,
showing
the night is over.

H.D.
We are these people,
wistful, ironical, wilful,
who have no part in
new-world reconstruction,
in the confederacy of labour.

H.D.
Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,
pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case
(what the skull can endure!)

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.
The race may or may not be to the swift,
but tell me, is it likely
that the fight will be entrusted to the dead?

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.
We are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known,
the unrecorded;
we have no map;
possibly we will reach haven,
heaven.

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

H.D.
O beautiful white land,
olives and wild anemone and violet
mingled among the shale,
and purple wings
of little winter-butterflies
say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.

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.
If you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

H.D.
So you may say,
"Greek flower; Greek ecstasy reclaims for ever
one who died following
intricate songs' lost measure."

H.D.
Love has no charm
when Love is swept to earth:
you'd make a lop-winged god,
frozen and contrite,
of god up-darting,
winged for passionate flight.

H.D.
Be indigestible, hard, ungiving.
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.

H.D.