Ted Hughes Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

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
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 world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Ted Hughes
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
The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument.

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
Ten years after your death
I meet on a page of your journal, as never before,
The shock of your joy.

Ted Hughes
Fourteen centuries have learned,
From charred remains, that what took place
When Alexandria's library burned
Brain-damaged the human race.

Ted Hughes
I think it's the shock of every writer's life when their first book is published. The shock of their lives. One has somehow to adjust from being anonymous, a figure in ambush, working from concealment, to being and working in full public view. It had an enormous effect on me. My impression was that I had suddenly walked into a wall of heavy hostile fire.

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
He swayed in the strong wind that pressed against his back. He swayed forward, on the brink of the high cliff. And his right foot, his enormous iron right foot, lifted-up, out, into space, and the Iron Man stepped forward, off the cliff, into nothingness.

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
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
Grape is my mulatto mother
In this frozen whited country.

Ted Hughes
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Ted Hughes
That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.

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

Ted Hughes
He could not stand. It was not That he could not thrive, he was born With everything but the will – That can be deformed, just like a limb. Death was more interesting to him. Life could not get his attention.

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
I Saw The Horses:
Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,
With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making No Sound.
I Passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments
Of a grey silent world.

Ted Hughes
The brassy wood-pigeons
Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun
Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

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
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Ted Hughes
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast.

Ted Hughes
I was a post-war, utility son-in-law!
Not quite the Frog-Prince. Maybe the Swineherd.

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
Russia and America circle each other;
Threats nudge an act that were without doubt
A melting of the mould in the mother,
Stones melting about the root.

Ted Hughes