Wilfred Owen Quotes

Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. ~ Wilfred Owen

And you have fixed my life - however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze. ~ Wilfred Owen

The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language ... everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious. ~ Wilfred Owen

There breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead. ~ Wilfred Owen

All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want. ~ Wilfred Owen

No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness. ~ Wilfred Owen

I am the enemy you killed, my friend. ~ Wilfred Owen

These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment. ~ Wilfred Owen

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum
however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology
he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him ... (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124). ~ W.B.Yeats

I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry? ~ Wilfred Owen

At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless ting? My time with you in short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?'

Some of the kids - Gloria was one of them - now looked lost, but Pete understood exactly what Mr. Ricker, aka Ricky the Hippie, was talking about...

'Time is the answer," Mr Ricker said on the first day of Pete's sophomore year. He strode back and forth, antique bellbottoms swishing, occasionally waving his arms. "Yes! Time mercilessly culls away the is-stupid from the not-stupid."
...
"It will occur for you, young ladies and gentlemen, although I will be in your rear-view mirror by the time it happens. Shall I tell you how it happens? You will read something - perhaps 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' by Wilfred Owen. Shall we use that as an example? Why not?'

Then, in a deeper voice that sent chills up Pete's back and tightened his throat, Mr. Ricker cried, " 'Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge...' And son on. Cetra-cetra. Some of you will say, This is stupid."

~ Stephen King

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,
By his dead smile, I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains[3]that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from prog ~ Wilfred Owen

Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold. ~ Wilfred Owen

And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies. ~ Wilfred Owen

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. ~ Wilfred Owen

Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one ~ Wilfred Owen

It's called 'The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935'. They let a man named Yeats make the choosings. They shouldn't have. Who is he - and what does he know about verse?
I hunted through that book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. There weren't any - not one. And do you know why not? Because Mr Yeats said - he said, "I deliberately chose NOT to include any poems from World War I. I have a distaste for them. Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. ~ Wilfred Owen

Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting, Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting. ~ Wilfred Owen

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head. ~ Wilfred Owen

I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed. ~ Wilfred Owen

Shall they return to beating of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to village wells,
Up half-known roads. ~ Wilfred Owen

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.
And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid
Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,
Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,
And the fresh-severed head of it, my head. ~ Wilfred Owen

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, - knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags. ~ Wilfred Owen

She is elegant rather than belle. ~ Wilfred Owen

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote! ~ Wilfred Owen

Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill. ~ Wilfred Owen

The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter. ~ Wilfred Owen

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall,
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds. ~ Wilfred Owen

I tried to peg out soldierly,
no use!
One dies of war like any old disease. ~ Wilfred Owen

Was it for this the clay grew tall? O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all? ~ Wilfred Owen

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for your country. ~ Wilfred Owen

Strange friend,' I said,'here is no cause to mourn.' 'None,'said the other,'save the undone years, The hopelessness.Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world. ~ Wilfred Owen

I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears. ~ Wilfred Owen

My soul's a little grief, grappling your chest,
To climb your throat on sobs; easily chased
On other sighs and wiped by fresher winds. ~ Wilfred Owen

The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned:
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground. ~ Wilfred Owen

Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad. ~ Wilfred Owen

All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me. ~ Wilfred Owen

Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead. ~ Wilfred Owen

The dust that fell unnoted as a dew,
Wrapped the dead city's face like mummy-cloth ~ Wilfred Owen

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's. ~ Wilfred Owen

All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful. ~ Wilfred Owen

The marvel is that we did not all die of cold. As a matter of fact, only one of my party actually froze to death before he could be got back, but I am not able to tell how many have ended up in hospital. We were marooned in a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death. ~ Wilfred Owen

The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope. ~ Wilfred Owen

My arms have mutinied against me - brutes!
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,
My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.
Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease. ~ Wilfred Owen

After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve. ~ Wilfred Owen

Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose. ~ Wilfred Owen

Some say God caught them even before they fell. ~ Wilfred Owen

My subject is war, and the pity of war. ~ Wilfred Owen

[...] The idea of honor in battle has been passed down for generations. It went from Greece to Rome, to the medieval world and the Crusades. It was beloved of Sir Philip Sidney, Essex and Southampton [...]. In many ways, the British Empire was founded on it [...] The idea came to a halt in the First World War [...] The poets, led by Wilfred Owen, told the truth about it "[...] The old lie : 'Dulce el decorum est pro patria mori'.
[...]Henry IV Part I is a play with much "honor". Honor is its central theme. So let's examine Henry IV Part I for a moment, to understand the ingredients of "honor". [...] You will notice there are not many women in these plays [about honor]-and when they appear, they are usually whores or faifthful wives. Honor is not a woman's story[...] 'What is honour? A word', (...) a mere scutcheon" [says] Falstaff's iconoclasm and truthful vision about honor.
{...]There are several things we can see in all this. The first is that war is a man´s game, it is intolerable, and the only way you can get people to do it is to make the alternative seem a hundred times worse [...] Therefore, valor must be glorified, if not deified. [...] ~ Tina Packer

Walking abroad, one is the admiration of all little boys, and meets an approving glance from every eye of elderly. ~ Wilfred Owen

Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War. ~ Wilfred Owen

Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill. ~ Wilfred Owen

Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter. ~ Wilfred Owen

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ~ Wilfred Owen

Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot ~ Wilfred Owen

The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting - the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like "I have lost my left leg" or "I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover." Because it provided no way of saying "I am going up the line again," its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out "I am being sent down to the base," he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being "quite" well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital. ~ Paul Fussell

Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,
But here the thing's best left at home with friends. ~ Wilfred Owen

He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry ~ Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun-
gently its touch awoke him once, ~ Wilfred Owen

When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to - it leaves nothing. ~ Wilfred Owen

Consummation is consumption
We cannot consummate our bliss and not consume
All joys are cakes and vanish in eating
All bliss is sugar's melting in the mouth ~ Wilfred Owen

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. ~ Wilfred Owen

Winter Song The browns, the olives, and the yellows died, And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide, And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed, Fell back, and down the snow-drifts flamed and flowed. From off your face, into the winds of winter, The sun-brown and the summer-gold are blowing; But they shall gleam with spiritual glinter, When paler beauty on your brows falls snowing, And through those snows my looks shall be soft-going. ~ Wilfred Owen

All a poet can do today is warn. ~ Wilfred Owen

I'm just constantly trying to renew and give myself new challenges and push myself to uncomfortable places, trying to get better. ~ Clive Owen

You'll never meet a nicer guy than Owen Wilson. ~ Vince Vaughn

Something I don't like seeing in other people is naked ambition, when somebody is really pushing hard to get to where they want to be. That's the way I look at that word - like you must be stepping on someone to get there. And I've never been comfortable with that. ~ Clive Owen

Don't give me your knives. Don't give up. Don't you dare give up. ~ Jennifer Estep

The boundary of man is moderation. When once we pass that pale our guardian angel quits his charge of us. ~ Owen Feltham

The work of a believer is responsive, not initiative. We respond to God's love because we must. Like Peter, when called to do the impossible, we do not look to our limitations, but we ponder this: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life" (John 6:68). Owen says this: "Mortification of any sin must be by a supply of grace. Of ourselves, we cannot do it."31 The gospel does not take us halfway there. God takes us all the way home. But if what you seek is grace apart from Christ's blood, you will never get home. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire. ~ Wilfred Bion

I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future. ~ Wilfred Thesiger

It must be observed, that the best of men, the most holy and spiritually minded, may have, nay, ought to have, their thoughts of spiritual things excited, multiplied, and confirmed, by the preaching of the word. ~ John Owen

When we have communion with God in the doctrine we contend for-then shall we be garrisoned by the grace of God against all the assaults of men. ~ John Owen

What then is holiness? Holiness is nothing but the implanting, writing and living out of the gospel in our souls (Eph 4:24). ~ John Owen

God has made no one absolute. ~ Owen Feltham

Most redoubted lord and right sovereign cousin, may the Almighty Lord have you in his keeping. ~ Owen Glendower

How many would die did not hope sustain them ... ~ Owen Feltham

I will not judge a person to be spiritually dead whom I have formerly judged to have had spiritual life, though I see him at present in a swoon as to evidences of the spiritual life. And the reason why I will not judge him so is this - because if you judge a person dead, you neglect him, you leave him; but if judge him to be in a swoon, though never so dangerous, you use all means for the retrieving of his life. ~ John Owen

Self-esteem comes from not letting unrelated external occurrences be tied to your own self-worth. ~ Sam Owen

I'm fearless. This man can cure anything. I smile. ~ Katherine Owen

We can have no power from Christ unless we live in a persuasion that we have none of our own. ~ John Owen

I just love playing good guys. ~ Clive Owen

Never forget what took me a life time to learn;
you have only one heart,
be true to it." ~ Sarah ~ Caspian Tredwell-Owen

Dieting is long-haul. Many rapid weight loss programs actually only squeeze the water out of you. Just like a wet sponge. But a good dieter maintains his or her grip on that sponge, not letting it soak up water again. ~ Owen Jones

No heart can conceive that treasury of mercies which lies in this one privilege, in having liberty and ability to approach unto God at all times, according to his mind and will. ~ John Owen

I really believe that more harm is done by old men who cling to their influence than by young men who anticipate it. ~ Owen D. Young

As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

Often, we are too slow to recognize
how much and in what ways we can assist each other
through sharing expertise and knowledge. ~ Owen Arthur

No man can expect to find a friend without faults; nor can he propose himself to be so to another. Without reciprocal mildness and temperance there can be no continuance of friendship. Every man will have something to do for his friend, and something to bear with in him. The sober man only can do the first; and for the latter, patience is requisite. It is better for a man to depend on himself, than to be annoyed with either a madman or a fool. ~ Owen Feltham

It is therefore, the interest of all, that every one, from birth, should be well educated, physically and mentally, that society may be improved in its character, - that everyone should be beneficially employed, physically and mentally, that the greatest amount of wealth may be created, and knowledge attained, - that everyone should be placed in the midst of those external circumstances that will produce the greatest number of pleasurable sensations, through the longest life, that man may be made truly intelligent, moral and happy, and be thus prepared to enter upon the coming Millennium. ~ Robert Owen

There's a real bonding in someone beating the crap out of you. - Rolly ~ Sarah Dessen

Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their 'particles') the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.

It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confi ~ Owen Barfield

It is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live,' he argued. 'If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street. ~ Owen Jones

And just as there was something of every Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh so there is something of Ho Chi Minh in almost every present-day Vietnamese, so strong is his imprint on the Vietnamese nation. ~ Wilfred Burchett

I want you to remember how your heart reacts every time I kiss you."
I want you to remember my hands, and how they can't stop touching you."
"And I need you to remember that anyone can make love. But I'm the only one who deserves to make love to you. ~ Colleen Hoover

There is not a day but sin foils or is foiled, prevails or is prevailed upon. It will always be so while we live in this world. Sin will not spare for one day. There is no safety but in a constant warfare for those who desire deliverance from sin's perplexing rebellion. ~ John Owen

We have to allow ourselves to feel it in order to heal it. ~ Sam Owen

The end of a dissolute life is a desperate death. ~ Wilfred Bion