R. S. Thomas Quotes

The deep spaces between stars, Fathomless as the cold shadow His mind cast.

True Christianity at its most profound is as good as you get. … I think I've been lucky in the period which I've lived through because obviously I would have been for the chop in earlier days. The Inquisition would have rooted me out; even in the 19th century I would probably have been had up by a Bishop and asked to change my views, or to keep them to myself etc.... I think that so much of our Christian beliefs … are an attempt to convey through language something which is unsayable.

... the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.

To all light things
I compared her: to
a snowflake, a feather

Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Verse should be as natural As the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty

You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.

somewhere within sight of the tree of poetry that is eternity wearing the green leaves of time.

Art is recuperation from time. I lie back convalescing upon the prospect of a harvest already at hand.

Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.

In the silence that is his chosen medium of communication and telling others about it in words. Is there no way not to be the sport of reason?

I'm obviously not orthodox, I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.

Seated at table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence; noiselessly
they conversed.

Why are my hands this way That they will not do as i say? Does no God hear when I pray?

A slow singer, but loading each phrase With history’s overtones, love, joy And grief learned by his dark tribe In other orchards and passed on Instinctively as they are now, But fresh always with new tears.