Ted Hughes Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen.
Night passed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Hughes
I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars...

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Hughes
The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches like torn tin.

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

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

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
So we found the end of our journey. So we stood, alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

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

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
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