R. S. Thomas Quotes

Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am left alone on the surface of a turning planet. What <p> to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?

I had looked forward to old age as a time of quietness, a time to draw my horizons about me, to watch memories ripening in the sunlight of a walled garden. But there is the void over my head and the distance within that the tireless signals come from. And astronaut on impossible journeys to the far side of the self I return with messages I cannot decipher.

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?

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

Is there a place here for the spirit? Is there time on this brief platform for anything other than mind's failure to explain itself?

It was not I who lived, but life rather that lived me.

A power guided my hand. If an invisible company waited to see what I would do, I in my own way asked for direction, so we should journey together a little nearer the accomplishment of the design.

There was a larger pattern we worked at: they on a big loom, I with a small needle.

Sometimes a strange light shines, purer than the moon, casting no shadow, that is the halo upon the bones of the pioneers who died for truth.

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.

The darkness is the deepening shadow of your presence; the silence a process in the metabolism of the being of love.

It is alive. It is you, God. Looking out I can see no death. The earth moves, the sea moves, the wind goes on its exuberant journeys. Many creatures reflect you, the flowers your color, the tides the precision of your calculations. There is nothing too ample for you to overflow, nothing so small that your workmanship is not revealed.

Deliver me from the long drought of the mind. Let leaves from the deciduous Cross fall on us, washing us clean, turning our autumn to gold by the affluence of their fountain.

She is young. Have I the right Even to name her? Child, It is not love I offer Your quick limbs, your eyes; Only the barren homage Of an old man whom time Crucifies.

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