01c. 1948 ADThe 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.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
02c. 1948 ADHe could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
03c. 1948 ADNobody wanted your dance,Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your flounderingDrowning life and your effort to save yourself,Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,Looking for something to give.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
04c. 1948 ADThe inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
05c. 1948 ADI 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.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
06c. 1948 ADImagine 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.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
07c. 1948 ADWhat’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
08c. 1948 ADThe difficult thing is not to pick up the information but to recognise it - to accept it into our consciousness. Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
09c. 1948 ADThere is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
10c. 1948 ADIf 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.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
11c. 1948 ADWell, the terrible fact is that though we are all more or less thinking of something or other all the time, some of us are thinking more and some less.Some brains are battling and working and remembering and puzzling things over all the time and other brains are just lying down, snoring and occasionally turning over. It is to the lazy minds that I am now speaking, and from my own experience I imagine this includes nineteen people out of every twenty. I am one of that clan myself and always have been.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
12c. 1948 ADIt is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
13c. 1948 ADEven 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 AgainTed Hughes / quote ↗
14c. 1948 ADThe difference between a fairly interesting writer and a fascinating writer is that the fascinating writer has a better nose for what genuinely excites him, he is hotter on the trail, he has a better instinct for what is truly alive in him. The worse writer may seem to be more sensible in many ways, but he is less sensible in this vital matter: he cannot distinguish what is full of life from what is only half full or empty of it. And so his writing is less alive, and as a writer he is less alive, and in writing, as in everything else, nothing matters but life.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
15c. 1948 ADThere is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting?The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
16c. 1948 ADAnd that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
17c. 1948 ADWhat I am going to propose is that you write a novel.As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
18c. 1948 ADIn writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
19c. 1948 ADIf you were writing a book to be published, you might be restrained by the fear that your wild imaginings might drive some people crazy. As it is, you are free, you can go off in any direction whatsoever, so long as the flame in your mind burns that way.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
20c. 1948 ADSo we found the end of our journey.So we stood, alive in the river of light,Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
21c. 1948 ADThere is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
22c. 1948 ADThat’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. 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.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
23c. 1948 ADThat's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
24c. 1948 ADBlack was the without eyeBlack the within tongueBlack was the heartBlack the liver, black the lungsUnable to suck in lightBlack the blood in its loud tunnelBlack the bowels packed in furnaceBlack too the musclesStriving to pull out into the lightBlack the nerves, black the brainWith its tombed visionsBlack also the soul, the huge stammerOf the cry that, swelling, could notPronounce its sun.Ted Hughes / quote ↗
