H.D. Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

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

H.D.
In my garden
the winds have beaten
the ripe lilies;
in my garden, the salt
has wilted the first flakes
of young narcissus.

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

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

H.D.
Not God
with wine,
nor death,
nor hate for a cry,
but God with a song

H.D.
Remember the golden apple-trees; O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one, for they fall exhausted, numb, blind but in certain ecstasy, for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.

H.D.
Cheat me not with time,
with the dull ache of flesh,
for all flesh turns,
even the loveliest
ankle and frail thigh,
to bitterest dust.

H.D.
I spit
honey out of my mouth:
nothing is second-best
after the sweet of Eros.

H.D.
Let Love step down,
open the clasped hands,
forfeit the thorny crown,
retrieve the garment
that was whole,
body and spirit one, spirit and soul.

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.
Think of the moment you count
most foul in your life;
conjure it,
supplicate,
pray to it;
your face is bleak, you retract,
you dare not remember it.

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

H.D.
For you are abstract,
making no mistake,
slurring no word
in the rhythm you make,
the poem,
writ in the air.

H.D.
She did not look at the daffodils. They didn't mean anything. She looked at the daffodils. She said, 'Thank you for the daffodils.

H.D.
You are wind in a stark tree,
you are the stark tree unbent,
you are a strung bow,
you are an arrow.

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

H.D.
Nor skin nor hide nor fleece Shall cover you, Nor curtain of crimson nor fine Shelter of cedar-wood be over you, Nor the fir-tree Nor the pine.

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

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 reason is:
rats leave the sinking ship
but we...
we...
didn't leave,
so the ship
didn't sink,
and that's madness,
Lear's song
that's Touchstone's forest jest,
that's swan of Avon logic.

H.D.
We don't have to know,
only to be:
let go the jumble of worn words,
reason and vanity.

H.D.
For one moment seek
a lesser beauty
and a lesser grace,
but you will find
no peace in the end
save in her presence.

H.D.
War is a fevered god who takes alike maiden and king and clod....

H.D.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.

H.D.
War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment;
We, we alone, Nereids inviolate,
Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant:
Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.

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.
The Greeks have snatched up their spears.
They have pointed the helms of their ships
Toward the bulwarks of Troy.

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.