Dylan Thomas Quotes

Give me a sheet of paper & I can’t help filling it in. The result—more often than not—is good & bad, serious & comic, sincere & insincere, lucid or nonsensical by the turns of my whirligig mentality, started from the wrong end, a mentality that ran before it walked, & perhaps will never walk, that wanted to fly before it had the right even to think of wings.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now, 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.

You'll never, I'll never let you, grow wise, and I'll never, you shall never let me, grow wise, and we'll always be young and unwise together. There is, I suppose, in the eyes of the They, a sort of sweet madness about you and me, a sort of mad bewilderment and astonishment oblivious to the Nasties and the Meanies; you’re the only person, of course you’re the only person from here to Aldebaran and back, with whom I’m free entirely; and I think it’s because you’re as innocent as me. Oh 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.

I love you so much I’ll never be able to tell you; I’m frightened to tell you. I can always feel your heart. Dance tunes are always right: I love you body and soul: — and I suppose body means that I want to touch you and be in bed with you, and i suppose soul means that i can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake

Swansea is a town where art is alive. If it became a cultural centre or a resort where art was fashionable and where it was always being discussed but never being created, it would be a town where art was dead... There is no room in Swansea to be pompous without becoming ludicrous, and all the pompous aspects of Swansea are ludicrous; but the town itself, the town of windows between hills and the sea, is unforgettable. What should Swansea become? It should, I think, generate its own species and become what it is now, a town where art is alive.

There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die.

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

I fell in love — that is the only expression I can think of — at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy.

Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides; And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads, The things of light File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith

And the whole pain flows open and I die.

And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables,
the nightjars
Flashing into the dark.

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.

A worm tells summer better than the clock,
The slug's a living calendar of days;
What shall it tell me if a timeless insect
Says the world wears away?