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Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam ... and after a while they will fall to dust and rain or else we will tear them down with impatient hands and hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

Conrad Aiken

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Conrad Aiken
Age: 84 †
Born: 1889
Born: August 5
Died: 1973
Died: August 17
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Savannah
Georgia
Conrad Aiken
Build
Ghostly
Rocks
Gleam
Tears
Impatient
Fall
Towers
Else
Tear
Hands
Dust
Earth
Rain
Rock
Lamplight

More quotes by Conrad Aiken

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The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.
Conrad Aiken
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I've tried it long ago, with hashish and peyote. Fascinating, yes, but no good, no. This, as we find in alcohol, is an escape from awareness, a cheat, a momentary substitution, and in the end a destruction of it.
Conrad Aiken
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We are the ghosts of the singing furies .
Conrad Aiken
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The hiss was now becoming a roar - the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow - but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.
Conrad Aiken
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Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck-- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.
Conrad Aiken
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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 a meeting place of sea and sea.
Conrad Aiken
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Time is a dream ... a destroying dream It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.
Conrad Aiken
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Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.
Conrad Aiken
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Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
Conrad Aiken
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[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.
Conrad Aiken
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I always hankered to be a composer - I was mad about music, though I never studied seriously, and can't read a note. But I learned to play the piano and became pretty skillful at improvisation, especially after a drop or two.
Conrad Aiken
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The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.
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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I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.
Conrad Aiken
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Death is one dream out of another flowing.
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.
Conrad Aiken
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Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.
Conrad Aiken
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Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!
Conrad Aiken
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I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.
Conrad Aiken