Ted Hughes quotes:

Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen. Night passed.

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

The Bush administration doesn't particularly like public participation. It makes them look bad.

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death.

So we found the end of our journey.So we stood, alive in the river of light,Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.

You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove."

This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast.

Wadsworth MoorWhere the millstone of skyGrinds light and shadow so purple-fineAnd has ground it so longGrinding the skin off the earthEarth bleeds her raw true darknessA land naked now as a woundThat the sun swabs and dabsWhere the miles of agony are numbnessAnd harebell and heather a euphoria

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars...

What happens in the heart simply happens.

Applause is the beginning of abuse

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is.

It took the whole of Creation to produce my foot, my each feather: now I hold Creation in my foot.

The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.

If you're all so peaceful up there, how did you get such greedy and cruel ideas?The dragon was silent for a long time after this question. And at last he said: It just came over me. I don't know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war-cries of the earth - I got excited, I wanted to join in.

You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

Even the most misfitting childWho's chanced upon the library's worth,Sits with the genius of the EarthAnd turns the key to the whole world.--"Hear It Again

As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

But who is stronger than death? Me , evidently .

Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.

Haven't you heard of the music of the spheres?" asked the dragon. "It's the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I'm a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.

He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.

One day God felt he ought to give his workshop a spring clean... It was amazing what ragged bits and pieces came from under his workbench as he swept. Beginnings of creatures, bits that looked useful but had seemed wrong, ideas he'd mislaid and forgotten... There was even a tiny lump of sun. He scratched his head. What could be done with all this rubbish?

Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.

So the self under the eye lies, Attendant and withdrawn.

The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it

The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument.

The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.

The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess?

The sea cries with its meaningless voice, Treating alike its dead and its living

The Shell The sea fills my ear with sand and with fear. You may wash out the sand, but never the sound of the ghost of the sea that is haunting me.

The wolf is living for the earth.

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.

The world's decay where the wind's hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust.

There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.

What happened casually remains -

What's writing really about? It's about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

where are the gods the gods hate us the gods have run away the gods have hidden in holes the gods are dead of the plague they rot and stink too there never were any gods there's only death

Where white is black and black is white, I won.

With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.

You are who you choose to be.

You could become internationally famous - you're Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove.