Stevie Smith Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

All Poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is to listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet.

Stevie Smith
This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.

Stevie Smith
There can be no good art that is international. Art to be vigorous and gesund must use the material at hand.

Stevie Smith
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith
My Muse sits forlorn She wishes she had not been born She sits in the cold No word she says is ever told.

Stevie Smith
Yet a time may come when a poet or any person Having a long life behind him, pleasure and sorrow... May fancy life comes to him with love and says: We are friends enough now for me to give you death; Then he may commit suicide, then He may go.

Stevie Smith
I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am growing impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend.

Stevie Smith
Who is this that comes in grandeur, coming from the blazing East?
This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ.

Stevie Smith
Oh I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good...

Stevie Smith
So I fancy my Muse says, when I wish to die,
Oh no, Oh no, we are not yet friends enough,
And Virtue also says:
We are not yet friends enough.

Stevie Smith
No man has seen her, this pitiful ghost,
And no woman either, but heard her at most,
Sighing and tapping and sighing again,
You have weaned me too soon, you must nurse me again.

Stevie Smith
Death's not a separation or alteration or parting it's just a one-handled door.

Stevie Smith
All the same, there is a difficulty. I should like him to be happy in heaven here,
But he cannot come by wishing. Only by being already at home here.

Stevie Smith
Love is not love that wounded bleeds And bleeding sullies slow. Come death within my hands and I Unto my love will go.

Stevie Smith
Oh Lion in a peculiar guise, Sharp Roman road to Paradise, Come eat me up, I'll pay thy toll With all my flesh, and keep my soul.

Stevie Smith
The boat that took my love away
He sent again to me
To tell me that he would not sleep
Alone beneath the sea.

Stevie Smith
Fourteen-year-old, why must you giggle and dote,
Fourteen-year-old, why are you such a goat?
I'm fourteen years old, that is the reason,
I giggle and dote in season.

Stevie Smith
Here is all straight and narrow as a tomb
Oh shut me not within a little room.

Stevie Smith
The capacity women have for just hanging on is depressing to contemplate.

Stevie Smith
You say I must write another book? But I've just written this one.
You like it so much that's the reason? Read it again then.

Stevie Smith
Marred pleasure's best, shadow makes the sun strong.

Stevie Smith
I may be smelly and I may be old, Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools, But where my fish float by I bless their swimming, And I like the people to bathe in me especially women.

Stevie Smith
I'll have your heart, if not by gift my knife Shall carve it out. I'll have your heart, your life.

Stevie Smith
O happy dogs of England, Bark well at errand boys, If you lived anywhere else, You would not be allowed to make such an infernal noise.

Stevie Smith
As Nature is always careless and indifferent
Who sees, who steps, means nothing and this is pretty.

Stevie Smith
Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you'll be able
Very soon not even to cry pretty
And so be delivered entirely from humanity
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.

Stevie Smith
Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

Stevie Smith
He wrote The I and the It
He wrote The It and Me
He died at Marienbad
And now we are all at sea.

Stevie Smith
To choose a god of love, as he did and does,
Is a little move then?

Yes, it is.

A larger one will be when men
Love love and hate hate but do not deify them?

It will be a larger one.

Stevie Smith
Beware the man whose mouth is small
For he'll give nothing and take all.

Stevie Smith