R. S. Thomas Quotes

71 Sourced Quotes

Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

R. S. Thomas
She is young. Have I the right
Even to name her? Child,
It is not love I offer
Your quick limbs, your eyes;
Only the barren homage
Of an old man whom time
Crucifies.

R. S. Thomas
Stay, then, village, for round you spins
On slow axis a world as vast
And meaningful as any poised
By great Plato's solitary mind.

R. S. Thomas
True Christianity at its most profound is as good as you get. … I think I've been lucky in the period which I've lived through because obviously I would have been for the chop in earlier days. The Inquisition would have rooted me out; even in the 19th century I would probably have been had up by a Bishop and asked to change my views, or to keep them to myself etc.... I think that so much of our Christian beliefs … are an attempt to convey through language something which is unsayable.

R. S. Thomas
The deep spaces between stars,
Fathomless as the cold shadow
His mind cast.

R. S. Thomas
Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust
Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.

R. S. Thomas
The pulpit is a kind of block-house
From which to fire the random shot
Of innuendo; but woe betide the man
Who leaves the pulpit for the individual Assault.

R. S. Thomas
It was the mind's weight
Kept me bent, as I grew tall.

R. S. Thomas
What was the shell doing,
on the shore? An ear endlessly
drinking?
What? Sound? Silence?
Which came first?
Listen.

R. S. Thomas
It is alive. It is you,
God. Looking out I can see
no death. The earth moves, the
sea moves, the wind goes
on its exuberant
journeys. Many creatures
reflect you, the flowers
your color, the tides the precision
of your calculations. There
is nothing too ample
for you to overflow, nothing
so small that your workmanship
is not revealed.

R. S. Thomas
Verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty

R. S. Thomas
God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find.

R. S. Thomas
Deliver me from the long drought
of the mind. Let leaves
from the deciduous Cross
fall on us, washing
us clean, turning our autumn
to gold by the affluence of their fountain.

R. S. Thomas
Hate takes a long time
To grow in, and mine
Has increased from birth;
…I find
This hate's for my own kind…

R. S. Thomas
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man's body.

R. S. Thomas
I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in
the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and
falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without
light
and companionless. And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

R. S. Thomas
Those who crowd
A small window dirty it
With their breathing, though sublime
And inexhaustible the view.

R. S. Thomas
Art is recuperation
from time. I lie back
convalescing upon the prospect
of a harvest already at hand.

R. S. Thomas
You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.

R. S. Thomas
They chose their pastors as they chose their horses
For their hard work

R. S. Thomas
Is there a place
here for the spirit? Is there time
on this brief platform for anything
other than mind's failure to explain itself?

R. S. Thomas