Dylan Thomas quotes:

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.

Though lovers be lost love shall not.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.

You wouldn't think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills. And all the people are open and friendly.

Chastity prays for me, piety sings, Innocence sweetens my last black breath, Modesty hides my thighs in her wings, And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that.

When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.

I love you more than anybody in the world... I love you for millions and millions of things, clocks and vampires and dirty nails and squiggly paintings and lovely hair and being dizzy and falling dreams.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart; Push in their tides.

Join the army and see the next world.

Though they go mad they shall be sane, though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.

When logics die, The secret of the soil grows through the eye, And blood jumps in the sun; Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

All world was one, one windy nothing, My world was christened in a stream of milk.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs.

And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion.

Especially when the October wind With frosty fingers punishes my hair, Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire And cast a shadow crab upon the land, By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds, Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks, My busy heart who shudders as she talks Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs

The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

Come on up, boys-I'm dead.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.

And I roseIn rainy autumnAnd walked abroad in a shower of all my days...

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.

I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.

I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.

Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

Life always offers you a second chance. is called tomorrow.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.

Youth calls to age across the tired years: 'What have you found,' he cries, 'what have you sought?" 'What have you found,' age answers through his tears, 'What have you sought.

I hold a beast, an angel and a madman within me.

Do not go gently into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Love is the last light spoken.

And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.

My birthday began with the water - Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name.

The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

I believe in New Yorkers. Whether theyâ??ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldnâ??t know, because I wonâ??t ever dare ask that question.

Why do men think you can pick love up and re-light it like a candle? Women know when love is over.

the closer I move To death, one man through his sundered hulks, The louder the sun blooms And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults....

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.

Oh, I'm a martyr to music.

I said some words to the close and holy darkness and then I slept.

I like to think of poetry as statements made on the way to the grave.

... an ugly, lovely town ... crawling, sprawling ... by the side of a long and splendid curving shore. This sea-town was my world.

Cold beer is bottled God.

I do not need any friends. I prefer enemies. They are better company and their feelings towards you are always genuine.

Out of the sighs a little comes, But not of grief, for I have knocked down that Before the agony; the spirit grows, Forgets, and cries; A little comes, is tasted and found good....

I have been told to reason by the heart, But heart, like head, leads helplessly; I have been told to reason by the pulse, And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace

But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything - you wouldn't think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

My tears are like the quiet drift of petals from some magic rose; and all my grief flows from the rift of unremembered skies and snows. I think that if I touched the earth, it would crumble; it is so sad and beautiful, so tremulously like a dream.

To begin, at the beginning...

the moment of a miracle is unending lightning ...

Love drips & gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores..." -Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.

The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.

Sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.

To begin at the beginning: It is a spring moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.

Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas

... Rebel against the flesh and bone, The word of the blood, the wily skin, And the maggot no man can slay.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret; The code of night tapped on my tongue; What had been one was many sounding minded.

And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye!

The photograph is married to the eye, Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth....

Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?

It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.

In the beginning was the word, the word That from the solid bases of the light Abstracted all the letters of the void....

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where's their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You're looking up at me now. I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?

Hands have not tears to flow.

A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder.

And from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts Into the stony idiom of the brain....

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night...

I have just had eighteen whiskeys in a row. I do believe that is a record.

Rage, rage against the dying light

In the beginning was the secret brain. The brain was celled and soldered in the thought

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels....

Let the dry eyes perceive Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

...And time cast forth my mortal creature To drift or drown upon the seas Acquainted with the salt adventure Of tides that never touch the shores. - I who was rich was made the richer By sipping at the the vine of days...

This world is half the devil's and my own, Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl and curling round the bud that forks her eye.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.

Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true "Poem on His Birthday

I sang in my chains like the sea

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Too many of the artists of Wales spend too much time talking about the position of theartists of Wales.There is only one position for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

After the first death, there is no other.

I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bend by the same wintry fever.

A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in.

I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.