70 Quotes by Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet and writer, left an enduring mark on literature with his evocative and vivid use of language. His poems, including "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" and "Fern Hill," are celebrated for their lyrical beauty and exploration of themes such as life, death, and the passage of time. Thomas' distinctive style, characterized by lush imagery and a musical quality, captures the essence of the human experience and the emotional complexity of existence.
His contributions to the literary world extend to radio plays and prose works, showcasing his versatility and creativity. Thomas' legacy as a modernist poet who pushed the boundaries of language and emotion continues to influence generations of writers and poets.
Dylan Thomas Quotes
Do not go gently into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I hold a beast, an angel and a madman within me.
Life always offers you a second chance. is called tomorrow.
Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart; Push in their tides.
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.
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.
Love is the last light spoken.
An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.
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.
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.
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.
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
I do not need any friends. I prefer enemies. They are better company and their feelings towards you are always genuine.
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 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.
Cold beer is bottled God.
He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.
Come on up, boys -I'm dead.
My birthday began with the water - Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name.
I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.
Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.
Why do men think you can pick love up and re-light it like a candle? Women know when love is over.
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.
My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.
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.
Though lovers be lost love shall not.
I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they’ve ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn’t know, because I won’t ever dare ask that question.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
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.
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.
To begin at the beginning: It is a spring moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.
Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
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.
Oh, I'm a martyr to music.
And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.
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.
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.
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.
Man’s wants remain unsatisfied till death. Then, when his soul is naked, is he one With the man in the wind, and the west moon, With the harmonious thunder of the sun
After the first death, there is no other.
Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.
A good poem is a contribution to reality.
These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.
Join the army and see the next world.
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.
I've just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record.
Do not go gentle into the good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day.
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.
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.
The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.
Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?
It is the measure of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.
To begin, at the beginning.
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.
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.
The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it.
Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels.
The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.
Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.
The function of posterity is to look after itself.
But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything - you wouldn't think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.
And on seesaw Sunday nights, I'd woo who ever I would with my wicked eye!
The moment of a miracle is unending lightning.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.
I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.
You just wait. I'll sin 'til I blow up!
Sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.
"The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth."
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.
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.
Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.
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.
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.
Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.
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.
Love drips & gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores..." -Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
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.
Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.
Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true "Poem on His Birthday
Rage, rage against the dying light
And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in.
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.
Hands have not tears to flow.
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.
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.
Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.
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.
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.
― Dylan Thomas Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
