Ted Hughes Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

There are certain things that are just impressive, aren't there? One stone can be impressive and the stones around it aren't. It's the same with animals. Some, for some reason, are strangely impressive. They just get into you in a strange way. Certain birds obviously have this extra quality that fascinates your attention. Obviously hawks have always done that for me, as a great many others have — not only impressive in themselves but also in that they've accumulated an enormous literature making them even more impressive. And crows too. Crows are the central bird in many mythologies. The crow is at every extreme, lives on every piece of land on earth, the most intelligent bird.

Ted Hughes
At that time
I had not understood
How the death hurtling to and fro
Inside your head, had to alight somewhere
And again somewhere, and had to be kept moving.
And had to be rested
Temporarily somewhere.

Ted Hughes
Imagination isn't merely a surplus mental department meant for entertainment, but the most essential piece of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings.

Ted Hughes
The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

Ted Hughes
No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts. Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine. The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise—
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling.

Ted Hughes
Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat
As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes,
Continual wars and wives are what
Have tattered his ears and battered his head.

Ted Hughes
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly—
I kill where I please because it is all mine.

Ted Hughes
From the age of about eight or nine I read just about every comic book available in England. At that time my parents owned a newsagent's shop. I took the comics from the shop, read them, and put them back. That went on until I was twelve or thirteen. Then my mother brought in a sort of children's encyclopedia that included sections of folklore. Little folktales. I remember the shock of reading those stories. I could not believe that such wonderful things existed. … throughout your life you have certain literary shocks, and the folktales were my first. From then on I began to collect folklore, folk stories, and mythology. That became my craze.

Ted Hughes
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie in the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.

Ted Hughes
Every poem that works is like a metaphor of the whole mind writing, the solution of all the oppositions and imbalances going on at that time. When the mind finds the balance of all those things and projects it, that's a poem. It's a kind of hologram of the mental condition at that moment, which then immediately changes and moves on to some other sort of balance and rearrangement. What counts is that it be a symbol of that momentary wholeness. That's how I see it.

Ted Hughes
Haven't you heard of the music of the spheres? asked the dragon. It's the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I'm a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.

Ted Hughes
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

Ted Hughes
With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes
Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen.
Night passed.

Ted Hughes
Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.

Ted Hughes
You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove.

Ted Hughes
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Ted Hughes
You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.

Ted Hughes
Grape is my mulatto mother
In this frozen whited country.

Ted Hughes
Stare at the monster: remark How difficult it is to define just what Amounts to monstrosity in that Very ordinary appearance.

Ted Hughes
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

Ted Hughes
You were never
More than a step from Paradise.
You had instant access, your analyst told you,
To the core of your Inferno –
The pit of your hairy flower.

Ted Hughes
Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow.

Ted Hughes
In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

Ted Hughes
Even the most misfitting child
Who's chanced upon the library's worth,
Sits with the genius of the Earth
And turns the key to the whole world.

Ted Hughes