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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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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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Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
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Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!
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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.
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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 a meeting place of sea and sea.
Conrad Aiken
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We are the ghosts of the singing furies .
Conrad Aiken
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Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.
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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My heart has become as hard as a city street, the horses trample upon it, it sings like iron, all day long and all night long they beat, they ring like the hooves of time.
Conrad Aiken
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[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.
Conrad Aiken
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The wind shrieks, the wind grieves It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.
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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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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I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.
Conrad Aiken
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The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams, the eternal asker of answers, stands in the street, and lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
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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All lovely things will have an ending, all lovely things will fade and die and youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.
Conrad Aiken
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Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.
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