53+ Conrad Aiken Quotes On Writing, Death And His

Conrad Aiken was an American author and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1930. He was known for his psychological themes, his engagement with the symbolic and his interest in the supernatural. He wrote over 50 works of fiction, poetry and essays, including the novel Ushant: An Essay (1952). Following is our collection on famous quotes by Conrad Aiken on writing, death, his life.

Top 10 Conrad Aiken Quotes

1. 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.
2. [At a musical concert:] . . . the music's pure algebra of enchantment.
3. 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.
4. Forward into the untrodden! Courage, old man, and hold on to your umbrella!
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Youth yearns to youth, full blood loves full blood only.
8. Life is the thing--the song of life-- The eager plow, the thirsty knife!
9. The one you love leans forward, smiles, deceives you, Opens a door through which you see dark dreams.
10. How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead, The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?

Conrad Aiken Short Quotes

• Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
• I'm not in the least Southern; I'm entirely New England.
• I'm afraid I wasn't much of a student, but my casual reading was enormous.
• One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive.
• The truth--a hideous spectacle!
• No god save self, that is the way to live.
• Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.
• We are the ghosts of the singing furies .
• I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.

Conrad Aiken Quotes About Death

Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust, The horns of glory blowing above my burial? — Conrad Aiken

Death is a meeting place of sea and sea. — Conrad Aiken

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

Death is one dream out of another flowing. — Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken Quotes About Love

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

One cricket said to another - come, let us be ridiculous, and say love! love love love love love let us be absurd, woman, and say hate! hate hate hate hate hate and then let us be angelic and say nothing. — Conrad Aiken

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

I love you, what star do you live on? — Conrad Aiken

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

Conrad Aiken Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office. — Conrad Aiken

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

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

I think it's very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself. — Conrad Aiken

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

He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show. — Conrad Aiken

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

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

It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing -- to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos -- of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings -- in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, "This is I! — Conrad Aiken

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

I think there's an enormous lot of talent around, and somewhere amongst these I'm sure that something will emerge, given time. — Conrad Aiken

I ascend from darkness And depart on the winds of space for I know not where; My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket, And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair. — Conrad Aiken

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again. — Conrad Aiken

All that is beautiful, and all that looks on beauty with eyes filled with fire, like a lover's eyes: all of this is yours; you gave it to me, sunlight! all these stars are yours; you gave them to me, skies! — Conrad Aiken

For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter. — Conrad Aiken

Variations: II Green light, from the moon, Pours over the dark blue trees, Green light from the autumn moon Pours on the grass ... Green light falls on the goblin fountain Where hesitant lovers meet and pass. They laugh in the moonlight, touching hands, They move like leaves on the wind ... I remember an autumn night like this, And not so long ago, When other lovers were blown like leaves, Before the coming of snow. — Conrad Aiken

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

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

Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable. — Conrad Aiken

Schoolchildren all over America are told to write to authors-often to authors whom they have never before heard of, whose work they are to young to understand in the least, and often in letters which are almost illiterate. If children are to be taught to respect the work of American poets I think some better way might be found to do so- some way which would not make such an inconsiderate demand on the author's time. — Conrad Aiken

I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It's simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe. — Conrad Aiken

I think we've come to a kind of splinter period in poetry. These tiny little bright fragments of observation - and not produced under sufficient pressure - some of it's very skillful, but I don't think there's anywhere a discernible major poet in the process of emerging; or if he is, I ain't seen him. — Conrad Aiken

You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it. — Conrad Aiken

O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best beloved and I, close well above us, that we may rest forever, sending up grass and blossoms to the sky. — Conrad Aiken

Life Lessons by Conrad Aiken

1. Conrad Aiken's work emphasizes the importance of embracing life's uncertainties and the beauty of the unknown. He encourages readers to take risks and explore the world around them, rather than settling for the status quo.
2. Aiken also emphasizes the power of self-reflection and the importance of understanding one's inner self. He encourages readers to be honest with themselves and to take responsibility for their own actions and decisions.
3. Lastly, Aiken's writing emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and appreciating the beauty of the world around us. He encourages readers to take time to appreciate the small moments and to be mindful of the beauty in life.