Best 81 quotes of Hilda Doolittle on MyQuotes

Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.

Alas, day, you brought light, You trailed splendour You showed us god: I salute you, most precious one, But I go to a new place, Another life.

Ardent yet chill and formal, how I ache to tempt a chisel as a sculptor.

A slight wind shakes the seed-pods my thoughts are spent as the black seeds.

But beauty is set apart, beauty is cast by the sea, a barren rock, beauty is set about with wrecks of ships.

Cheat me not with time, with the dull ache of flesh, for all flesh turns, even the loveliest ankle and frail thigh, to bitterest dust.

Could beauty be beaten out, O youth the cities have sent to strike at each other's strength, it is you who have kept her alight.

Dance until the earth dance.

Dead men would start and move toward me to learn of love.

Escape from the power of the hunting pack, and to know that wisdom is best and beauty sheer holiness.

Every concrete object has abstract value, is timeless in the dream parallel.

Fall the deep curtains, delicate the weave, fair the thread.

For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.

For you are abstract, making no mistake, slurring no word in the rhythm you make, the poem, writ in the air.

I could not accept from wisdom what love taught, woman is perfect.

I fear no man, no woman; flower does not fear bird, insect nor adder.

I had drawn away into the salt, myself, a shell emptied of life.

I knew the poor, I knew the hideous death they die, when famine lays its bleak hand on the door; I knew the rich, sated with merriment, who yet are sad.

I myself have seen the floating ships And nothing will ever be the same The shouts, The harrowing voices within the house. I stand apart with an army: My mind is graven with ships.

In my garden the winds have beaten the ripe lilies; in my garden, the salt has wilted the first flakes of young narcissus.

I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.

I spit honey out of my mouth: nothing is second-best after the sweet of Eros.

I testify to rainbow feathers, to the span of heaven and walls of colour, the colonnades of jasper.

It is no madness to say you will fall, you great cities.

I will be free, no lover's kiss to bind me to earth, no bliss of love to counteract actual bliss.

Let Love step down, open the clasped hands, forfeit the thorny crown, retrieve the garment that was whole, body and spirit one, spirit and soul.

Lift up our eyes to you? no, God, we stare and stare, upon a nearer thing that greets us here, Death, violent and near.

Long hours trail in their purple and long years are lost in just this moment while our souls are near, our mouths separate.

Love has no charm when Love is swept to earth: you'd make a lop-winged god, frozen and contrite, of god up-darting, winged for passionate flight.

Love is a garment riven in the light that rises from Parnassus, showing the night is over.

Lovers may come and go, there was the memory of blood, the low call.

Love that I bear within my breast how is my armour melted how my heart

Love, why have you sought the horde of spearsmen, why the tent Achilles pitched beside the river-ford?

Luminous, unfearful; high-priestesses, our fervour shall banish all evil.

Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.

Music sets up ladders, it makes us invisible, it sets us apart, it lets us escape; but from the visible there is no escape.

My eye-balls are glass, my limbs marble, my face fixed in its marble mask.

No man will be present in those mysteries, yet all men will kneel, no man will be potent, important, yet all men will feel what it is to be a woman.

No one knows, the heart of a child, how it grows until it is too late.

No one knows the colour of a flower till it is broken.

No poetic phantasy but a biological reality, a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant or sea-plant cell; I live; I am alive.

Not God with wine, nor death, nor hate for a cry, but God with a song

O beautiful white land, olives and wild anemone and violet mingled among the shale, and purple wings of little winter-butterflies say, here Psyche, the soul, lies.

O happy, happy each man whom predestined fate leads to the holy rite of hill and mountain worship.

One flower may slay the winter and meet death.

O ruthless, perilous, imperious hate, you can not thwart the promptings of my soul.

Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

Passionate grave thought, belief enhanced, ritual returned and magic.

Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of terrible lava, pressure on heart, lungs, the brain about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!)

remember the golden apple-trees; O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one, for they fall exhausted, numb, blind but in certain ecstasy, for theirs is the hunger for Paradise.