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
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

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
All tamed animals are nervous, we have given them reason to be, not only by cruelty but by our love too, that presses upon them. They have not been able to be entirely indifferent to this and untouched by it.

Stevie Smith
I'm sorry to say my dear wife is a dreamer,
And as she dreams she gets paler and leaner.
'Then be off to your Dream, with his fly-away hat,
I'll stay with the girls who are happy and fat.'

Stevie Smith
Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god
Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know,
Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp,
Come Death. Do not be slow.

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
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
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
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
The religion of Christianity
Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty
Reject this Sweetness, for she wears
A smoky dress out of hell fires.

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
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
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
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
People who are always praising the past
And especially the times of faith as best
Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages
And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.

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
The flower and fruit of love are mine
The ant, the fieldmouse and the mole

Stevie Smith
I made Man with too many faults. Yet I love him.
And if he wishes, I have a home above for him.

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
Oh these illegitimate babies!
Oh girls, girls,
Silly little valuable things,
You should have said, No, I am valuable,
And again, It is because I am valuable
I say, No.

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

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
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