Dylan Thomas Quotes

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy. ~ Dylan Thomas

And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables,
the nightjars
Flashing into the dark. ~ Dylan Thomas

I make one image - though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess - let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. ~ Dylan Thomas

If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that. ~ Dylan Thomas

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't. ~ Dylan Thomas

There are always Uncles at Christmas. ~ Dylan Thomas

The moment of a miracle is unending lightning ... ~ Dylan Thomas

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While ~ Fred Waitzkin

You just wait. I'll sin 'til I blow up! ~ Dylan Thomas

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea. ~ Dylan Thomas

This world is half the devil's and my own, / Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl / And curling round the bud that forks her eye. ~ Dylan Thomas

The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's side of the story. What was it like watching this guy drink himself out of here? How did it feel handing him number twenty-one and watching his face crumple up before the fall of the stool? And did he already have number twenty-two poured, waiting for this big fat tip, and then have to drink it himself after whoever came took the body away? ~ Michael Thomas Ford

By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency. ~ William Monahan

Thousands of miles,' I said. It's Rhosilli, USA. We're going to camp on a bit of rock that wobbles in the winds. ~ Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer ~ Dylan Thomas

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great. ~ Dylan Thomas

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which / Shall fall awake when cures and their itch / Raise up this red-eyed earth? ~ Dylan Thomas

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize. ~ Dylan Thomas

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party. ~ Dylan Thomas

Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas ~ Dylan Thomas

A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder. ~ Dylan Thomas

In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art. ~ Dylan Thomas

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. ~ Dylan Thomas

Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words. ~ Dylan Thomas

It's not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don't forget things like that. ~ Jeffrey Bernard

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void ... ~ Dylan Thomas

All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk. ~ Dylan Thomas

To begin at the beginning: It is a spring moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black. ~ Dylan Thomas

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. ~ Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed. ~ Katie Roiphe

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs. ~ Dylan Thomas

Love drips & gathers,
but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores ...
-Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower. ~ Dylan Thomas

The only surprising thing about miracles, however small, is that they sometimes happen. ~ Dylan Thomas

My birthday began with the water -
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name. ~ Dylan Thomas

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith ~ Dylan Thomas

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death! ~ Dylan Thomas

I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners. ~ Dylan Thomas

Cold beer is bottled God. ~ Dylan Thomas

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident. ~ Dylan Thomas

Man be my metaphor', ~ Dylan Thomas

And time cast forth my mortal creature To drift or drown upon the seas Acquainted with the salt adventure Of tides that never touch the shores. I who was rich was made the richer By sipping at the vine of days. ~ Dylan Thomas

Hands have not tears to flow. ~ Dylan Thomas

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity. ~ Dylan Thomas

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest. ~ Dylan Thomas

If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well.
Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sell
My guns along the highway. My coins to the table
To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay.
Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well.

What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well.
From August to May
For a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris.
I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm unbroken.
But, oh, there's a schism unspoken, a mighty calling of the lee.
An absentminded Pirate, unaccustomed to the sea;
To the land, a traitor. I think it mightn't've ended well.

What might've worked for me? What might've ended well?
Soldier, to bloody sally forth through hell?
Teacher of glorious stories to tell?
Man of gold, or stores to sell?
Lover to a gentle belle?
Maybe a camel;
A seashell.
What mightn't've been a life where it mightn't've ended well? ~ Dylan Thomas

Sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box. ~ Dylan Thomas

Now that my kids are out of the house, I'm finally able to get to the classics I never read: Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22.' It's endless. They're all in this gigantic pile next to my bed. ~ Robin Wright

One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard; three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women. ~ Dylan Thomas

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. ~ Dylan Thomas

I'm unhappy as Dylan Thomas was, because I'm not, but I've had my brushes with sadness. ~ Tom Hollander

I hold a beast, an angel and a madman within me. ~ Dylan Thomas

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story. ~ Jay McInerney

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon.
She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow.
Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face? ~ Dylan Thomas

And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke. ~ Dylan Thomas

Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956):

Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict. ~ Kay Boyle

Craft the finest arrow
Forage jungles for straightest shaft
Forge sharpest head of glass
Pluck feathers of the wisest crow
Without the simplest archer and bow
Without a mark that's true
Useless
Craft the finest vessel
Fell the jungle's strongest mast
Build the world's mightiest hull
A flag the crown of all seas you can sew
Without the simplest oarsmen to row
Without a port that's true
Useless ~ Dylan Thomas McCall

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger. ~ Dylan Thomas

The function of posterity is to look after itself. ~ Dylan Thomas

When I was thirteen, I used to get high on Dylan Thomas, Blake, Wilde, and Yeats. ~ Jolie Holland

Within the microcosm of a film you get drawn to people. There are certain projects you care enormously about, and 'The Edge Of Love' was one because I was portraying a great hero of mine, Dylan Thomas. ~ Matthew Rhys

The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs. ~ Dylan Thomas

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas.
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work."
― Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems ~ Dylan Thomas

Mr Pugh: Pigs can't read, my dear.

Mrs Pugh: I know one who can. ~ Dylan Thomas

A hand rules heaven as a hand rules pity;
hands have no tears to flow. ~ Dylan Thomas

In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought ~ Dylan Thomas

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade. ~ Dylan Thomas

Come on up, boys
-I'm dead. ~ Dylan Thomas

I sang in my chains like the sea ~ Dylan Thomas

You must go around the states lecturing to women. And the inoffensive writers who've never dared lecture anyone, let alone women-they are frightened of women, they do not understand women, they write about women as creatures that never existed, ~ Dylan Thomas

Speak, then, o body, shout aloud, And break my only mind from chains To go where ploughing's ended. ~ Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day. ~ Dylan Thomas

Join the army and see the next world. ~ Dylan Thomas

Our aim for ever must be the pursuit of the knowledge of Man in his entirety. To study the flesh, the skin, the bones, the organs, the nerves of Man, is to equip our minds with a knowledge that will enable us to search beyond the body. The noble profession at whose threshold you stand as neophytes is not an end in itself. The science of Anatomy contributes to the great sum of all Knowledge, which is the Truth: the whole Truth of the Life of Man upon this turning earth. And so: Observe precisely. Record exactly. Neglect nothing. Fear no foe. Never swerve from your purpose. Pay no heed to Safety.
For I believe that all men can be happy and that the good life can be led upon this earth.
I believe that all men must work towards that end.
And I believe that that end justifies any means ... .
Let no scruples stand in the way of the progress of medical science! ~ Dylan Thomas

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night's ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death's feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie. ~ Dylan Thomas

Into the sea of yourself like a young dog, and bring out a pearl. ~ Dylan Thomas

A worm tells summer better than the clock,
The slug's a living calendar of days;
What shall it tell me if a timeless insect
Says the world wears away? ~ Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion. ~ Dylan Thomas

The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast. ~ Dylan Thomas

And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why. ~ Dylan Thomas

And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days ... ~ Dylan Thomas

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. ~ Dylan Thomas

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain ... ~ Dylan Thomas

Reaching a self freedom is the only object. ~ Dylan Thomas

In my Craft or Sullen Art
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
. On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and palms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages, ~ Dylan Thomas

Why do men think you can pick love up and re-light it like a candle? Women know when love is over. ~ Dylan Thomas

I'm not as self-destructive as Dylan Thomas, but I've certainly been around that behavior enough to have found it a release. The thing that I really enjoyed was being able to play misery. ~ Tom Hollander

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time
without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock. ~ Dylan Thomas

Please don't worry about me. My suffering is over. In the wise words of Dylan Thomas ... After the first death, there is no other. ~ Colleen Hoover

And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, Would you like anything to read? ~ Dylan Thomas

I had - along with my singing and dancing, I was very happy to be born in the hometown of Dylan Thomas. So the government was financing dramatic groups and amateur dramatics and stuff like that. ~ Catherine Zeta-Jones

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don't force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. ~ Ray Bradbury

Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted. ~ Dylan Thomas

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas. ~ Robert Adamson

And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye! ~ Dylan Thomas

A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in. ~ Dylan Thomas

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. ~ Dylan Thomas

Tell him I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, & in the rot in life. Tell him I am all for cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I'd prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day. Tell him I live exclusively on toenails and rumours. I sleep in a coffin too, and a wormy shroud is my summer suit. ~ Dylan Thomas

An ugly, lovely town ... crawling, sprawling ... by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world. ~ Dylan Thomas

Life is a terrible thing, thank God. ~ Dylan Thomas

My parents were inspired by Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas when naming me. They specifically saved this masculine name for their only girl. ~ Dylan Lauren