74 Quotes by Conrad Aiken

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing – to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos – of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings – in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, 'This is I!

The moon rose, and the moon set;And the stars rushed up and whirled and set;And again they swarmed, after a shaft of sunlight;And the dark blue dusk closed above him, like an ocean of regret.

It's time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.

So, talking with my first wife,At the dark end of evening, when she leanedAnd smiled at me, with blue eyes weaving websOf finest fire, revolving me in scarlet,--Calling to mind remote and small successionsOf countless other evenings ending so,--I smiled, and met her kiss, and wished her dead

Here too was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at least must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that - the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death... ("Mr. Arcularis")

Death is never an ending, death is a change;Death is beautiful, for death is strange;Death is one dream out of another flowing.

Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned.

Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.