Conrad Aiken Quotes

• “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.”

  Conrad Aiken

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

  Conrad Aiken

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• “It is moonlight. Alone in the silence
  I ascend my stairs once more,
  While waves remote in pale blue starlight
  Crash on a white sand shore.
  It is moonlight. The garden is silent.
  I stand in my room alone.
  Across my wall, from the far-off moon,
  A rain of fire is thrown.
  There are houses hanging above the stars,
  And stars hung under the sea,
  And a wind from the long blue vault of time
  Waves my curtains for me.
  I wait in the dark once more,
  swung between space and space:
  Before the mirror I lift my hands
  And face my remembered face.”

  Conrad Aiken

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• “Music I heard with you was more than music. And bread I broke with you was more than bread.”

  Conrad Aiken

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• “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.
  Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
  These things do not remember you, beloved:
  And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
  For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always:
  They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!”

  Conrad Aiken

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• “Cosmos mariner destination unknown”

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• “Variations: II
  
  Green light, from the moon,
  Pours over the dark blue trees,
  Green light from the autumn moon
  Pours on the grass ...
  Green light falls on the goblin fountain
  Where hesitant lovers meet and pass.
  
  They laugh in the moonlight, touching hands,
  They move like leaves on the wind ...
  I remember an autumn night like this,
  And not so long ago,
  When other lovers were blown like leaves,
  Before the coming of snow.”

  Conrad Aiken

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• “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")”

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• “Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked. And death was observed with sudden cries, And birth with laughter and pain. And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies And night came down again.”

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• “Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket - a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe-and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only a sense of possession - it was also a sense of protection. It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion.
  
  ("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")”

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• “It was gentler here, softer, its seethe the quietest of whispers, as if, in deference to a drawing room, it had quite deliberately put on its 'manners'; it kept itself out of sight, obliterated itself, but distinctly with an air of saying, 'Ah, but just wait! Wait till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you something new! Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them. Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed - I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost - I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter. Speak to them!...' It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window - but he could not be sure.
  
  ("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")”

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• “Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man,and hold on to your umbrella! Have you got your garters on? Mind your hat! ("Mr. Arcularis")”

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• “Everybody of course, was like this, - depth beyond depth, a universe chorally singing, incalculable, obeying tremendous laws, chemical or divine, of which it was able to give its own consciousness not the faintest inkling… He brushed the dark hair of this universe. He looked into its tranquil black-pooled eyes. Its mouth was humorous and bitter. And this universe would go out and talk inanely to other universes – talking only with some strange minute fraction of its identity, like a vast sea leaving on the shore, for all mention of itself, a single white pebble, meaningless. A universe that contained everything – all things – yet said only one word: ‘I.’ A music, an infinite symphony, beautifully and majestically conducting itself there in the darkness, but remaining for ever unread and unheard.”

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• “And the mist of snow, as he had foreseen, was still on it - a ghost of snow falling in the bright sunlight, softly and steadily floating and turning and pausing, soundlessly meeting the snow that covered, as with a transparent mirage, the bare bright cobbles. He loved it - he stood still and loved it. Its beauty was paralyzing - beyond all words, all experience, all dream. No fairy-story he had ever read could be compared with it - none had ever given him this extraordinary combination of ethereal loveliness with a something else, unnameable, which was just faintly and deliciously terrifying.
  
  ("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")”

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• “...Her eyes, he says, are stars at dusk,
  Her mouth as sweet as red-rose-musk;
  And when she dances his young heart swells
  With flutes and viols and silver bells;
  His brain is dizzy, his senses swim,
  When she slants her ragtime eyes at him...
  
  Moonlight shadows, he bids her see,
  Move no more silently than she.
  It was this way, he says, she came,
  Into his cold heart, bearing flame.
  And now that his heart is all on fire
  Will she refuse his heart's desire??...”

  Conrad Aiken

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• “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!”

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• “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.”

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• “. . . while daisies burn like stars on the darkened hill.”

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• “მონოლოგები ჩვენი ბავშვობისდროინდელი კაშკაშა ფერებით შეღებილ ჩინურ კვერცხებს გვაგონებენ, როდესაც ერთში მეორე იდო, მეორეში მესამე... ყოველი მათგანი უფრო პატარაა და რთული, ვიდრე მისი წინამორბედი”

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• “Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
  We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
  We have built a city of towers.”

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• “Know thyself! That was the best joke ever perpetrated. A steaming universe of germ-cells, a maelstrom of animal forces, of which he himself, his personality, was only the collective gleam.”

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

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• “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.”

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• “Bend as the bow bends, and let fly the shaft,
  the strong cord loose its words as light as flame;
  speak without cunning, love, as without craft,
  careless of answer, as of shame or blame:
  this to be known, that love is love, despite
  knowledge or ignorance, truth, untruth, despair;
  careless of all things, if that love be bright,
  careless of hate and fate, careless of care.
  Spring the word as it must, the leaf or flower
  broken or bruised, yet let it, broken, speak
  of time transcending this too transient hour,
  and space that finds the beating heart too weak:
  thus, and thus only, will our tempest come
  by continents of snow to find a home.”

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• “Silence thronged the room, and he was aware of the focused scrutiny of the three people who confronted him.”

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