Ted Hughes Quotes

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.”
― Ted Hughes

“Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted"

- Sylvia Plath's epitaph (from Wu Cheng'en's novel Journey to the West aka. Monkey, translated by Arthur Waley)”
― Wu Cheng'en

“In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Blood
Who begat Eye
Who begat Fear
Who begat Wing
Who begat Bone
Who begat Granite
Who begat Violet
Who begat Guitar
Who begat Sweat
Who begat Adam
Who begat Mary
Who begat God
Who begat Nothing
Who begat Never
Never Never Never

Who begat Crow

Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything

Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth”
― Ted Hughes, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow

“who can carry
The incineration of a Universe?”
― Ovid, Tales from Ovid: 24 Passages from the Metamorphoses

“CLEOPATRA TO THE ASP

The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it
Loved me like my soul, my soul:
Now that I seek myself in a serpent
My smile is fatal.

Nile moves in me; my thighs splay
Into the squalled Mediterranean;
My brain hides in that Abyssinia
Lost armies foundered towards.

Desert and river unwrinkle again.
Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk
Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.
Now let the snake reign.

A half-deity out of Capricorn,
This rigid Augustus mounts
With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn
Summarily the moon-horned river

From my bed. May the moon
Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole
With coiled Egypt's past; then from my delta
Swim like a fish toward Rome.”
― Ted Hughes, Lupercal

“Mary is an apple.
Whoever plucks her
Nails his heart
To the leafless tree.”
― Ted Hughes, Gaudete

“I am as happy here as I have ever been in my life: Ted and I take a long walk each day up to the moors (It’s generally rainy, or at least overcast) and never have I loved country so! All you can see us dark hills of heather stretching toward the horizon, as if you were striding on top of the world; last night at sunset the horizontal light turned us both luminous pink as we hiked in waterproof boots in the wuthering free wind, starting up rabbits that flicked away with a white flag of tail, staring back at the black-faced, gray furred moor sheep that graze, apparently wild, and with their curling horns looking like primeval yellow-eyed druid monsters. I never thought I could like any country as well as the ocean, but these moors are really even better, with the great luminous emerald lights changing always, and the animals and wildness. Read “Wuthering Heights” again here, and really felt it this time more than ever.

--from a letter to her mother Aurelia Schober Plath, written on 11 September 1956”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956

“And at that very moment, the smile arrived

And the crowd, shoving to get a glimpse of a man's soul
Stripped to its last shame,
Met this smile
That rose through his torn roots
Touching his lips, altering his eyes
And for a moment
Mending everything

Before it swept out and away across the earth.”
― Ted Hughes

“Critics established the right to say whatever they pleased about the dead. It is an absolute power, and the corruption that comes with it, very often, is an atrophy of the moral imagination. They move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead. They extend over the living that license to say whatever they please, to ransack their psyche and reinvent them however they please. They stand in front of classes and present this performance as exemplary civilized activity—this utter insensitivity towards other living human beings. Students see the easy power and are enthralled, and begin to outdo their teachers. For a person to be corrupted in that way is to be genuinely corrupted.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“The night snows stars and the earth creaks.”
― Ted Hughes, The Thought-Fox

“But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not “own” the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed. The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society’s fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody’s business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public’s inviolable right to be diverted and an individual’s wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse..”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Plath portrayed Hughes as a creator and destroyer of worlds, who spared little sentiment for the women he loved and left.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“She told Aurelia he was a "a violent Adam," "a breaker of things and people," "arrogant, used to walking over women like a blast of Jove's lightning," she had spent less than a week with him.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath