R. S. Thomas Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

There stood the ladies from the council houses:
Blue eyes and Birmingham yellow
Hair, and the ritual murder of vowels.

R. S. Thomas
Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

R. S. Thomas
I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. And astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with messages
I cannot decipher.

R. S. Thomas
I have been all men known to history,
Wondering at the world and at time passing;
I have seen evil, and the light blessing
Innocent love under a spring sky.

R. S. Thomas
I have known exile and a wild passion
Of longing changing to a cold ache.
King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns,
Knowing the body's sweetness, the mind's treason;
Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen,
Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart's need.

R. S. Thomas
I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens

R. S. Thomas
Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
At an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.

R. S. Thomas
Is a museum
Peace? I asked. Am I the keeper
Of the heart's relics, blowing the dust
In my own eyes? I am a man;
I never wanted the drab role
Life assigned me, an actor playing
To the past's audience upon a stage
Of earth and stone; the absurd label
Of birth, of race hanging askew
About my shoulders. I was in prison
Until you came; your voice was a key
Turning in the enormous lock
Of hopelessness. Did the door open
To let me out or yourselves in?

R. S. Thomas
The ousel singing in the woods of Cilgwri,
Tirelessly as a stream over the mossed stones,
Is not so old as the toad of Cors Fochno
Who feels the cold skin sagging round his bones.

R. S. Thomas
The nearest we approach God…is as creative beings. The poet, by echoing the primary imagination, recreates. Through his work he forces those who read him to do the same, thus bringing them... nearer to the actual being of God as displayed in action.

R. S. Thomas
Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as i say?
Does no God hear when I pray?

R. S. Thomas
But what to do? Doctors in verse
Being scarce now, most poets
Are their own patients, compelled to treat
Themselves first, their complaint being
Peculiar always.

R. S. Thomas
On seeing his shadow fall on such ancient rocks, he had to question himself in a different context and ask the same old question as before, "Who am I?", and the answer now came more emphatically than ever before, "No-one."
But a no-one with a crown of light about his head. He would remember a verse from Pindar: "Man is a dream about a shadow. But when some splendour falls upon him from God, a glory comes to him and his life is sweet."

R. S. Thomas
I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.

R. S. Thomas
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics…
And an impotent people,
Sick with inbreeding,
Worrying the carcase of an old song.

R. S. Thomas
I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

R. S. Thomas
In the darkness…the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

R. S. Thomas
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R. S. Thomas
Ah, what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am left alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo's
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?

R. S. Thomas
There was a larger pattern
we worked at: they on a big
loom, I with a small needle.

R. S. Thomas
A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

R. S. Thomas
It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.

R. S. Thomas
It was not
I who lived, but life rather
that lived me.

R. S. Thomas
To live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the spilled blood that went into the making of the wild sky

R. S. Thomas
A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes.

R. S. Thomas