Quote

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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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
Change
Ball
Crumpled
Find
Balls
Resurrected
Many
Brought
Discarded
Great
Paper
Slight
Something
Needed
Occasionally
Would
Hell
Missed
Open
Poems
Morning
Yellow

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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[At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.
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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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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Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!
Conrad Aiken
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I love you, what star do you live on?
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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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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Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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