Quotes by Dylan Thomas

“Land of my fathers? My fathers can keep it!”

“What's never known is safest in this life.Under the skysigns they who have no armshave cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghostAlone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.”

“Give me a sheet of paper & I can’t help filling it in. The result—more often than not—is good & bad, serious & comic, sincere & insincere, lucid or nonsensical by the turns of my whirligig mentalit...”

“None of us today want to read poems which we can understand as easily as the front page of the Express.”

“You'll never, I'll never let you, grow wise, and I'll never, you shall never let me, grow wise, and we'll always be young and unwise together. There is, I suppose, in the eyes of the They, a sort o...”

“Very much of my poetry is, I know an enquiry and a terror of fearful expectation, a discovery and facing of fear. I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working...”

“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of h...”

“In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means.”

“And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams.”

“And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long, In the sun born over and over, I ran my heedless ways.”

“Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

“I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words.”

“I did not care what the words said, overmuch, nor what happened to Jack & Jill & the Mother Goose rest of them; I cared for the shapes of sound that their names, and the words describing their acti...”

“I fell in love — that is the only expression I can think of — at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influenc...”

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes and rhythms, Yes, this is it. Th...”

“The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.”