Ted Hughes Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

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
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh By my ignorance of the simplest things.

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
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.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.

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've sometimes wondered if it wouldn't be a good idea to write under a few pseudonyms. Keep several quite different lines of writing going. Like Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet who tried four different poetic personalities. They all worked simultaneously. He simply lived with the four. What does Eliot say? Dance, dance, / Like a dancing bear, / Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape, / To find expression. It's certainly limiting to confine your writing to one public persona, because the moment you publish your own name you lose freedom.

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
There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.

Ted Hughes
Poems get to the point where they are stronger than you are. They come up from some other depth and they find a place on the page. You can never find that depth again, that same kind of authority and voice. I might feel I would like to change something about them, but they're still stronger than I am and I cannot.

Ted Hughes
And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.

Ted Hughes
The sea cries with its meaningless voice
Treating alike its dead and its living,
Probably bored with the appearance of heaven
After so many millions of nights without sleep,
Without purpose, without self-deception.

Ted Hughes
The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it

Ted Hughes
And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

Ted Hughes
And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.

Ted Hughes
Any form of violence, any vehement form of activity,
invokes the bigger energy, the elemental power circuit of
the universe.

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
Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.

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
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
The only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough…didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

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

Ted Hughes
The future's no calamitous change
But a malingering of now,
Histories, towns, faces that no
Malice or accident much derange.

Ted Hughes
The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

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

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
Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death
Do not worship the telephone
It drags its worshippers into actual graves
With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Ted Hughes
The river is a god
Knee-deep among the reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down at the door of a dam
It is a god, and inviolable.
And will wash itself of all deaths.

Ted Hughes
Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don't have that secret confession, you don't have a poem — don't even have a story. Don't have a writer. If most poetry doesn't seem to be in any sense confessional, it's because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it's almost entirely successful.

Ted Hughes
Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.

Ted Hughes