Hilda Doolittle

“We strove for a name,while the light of the lamps burnt thinand the outer dawn came in,a ghost, the last at the feastor the first,to sit withinwith the two that remainedto quibble in flowers and verseover a girl's name.”

“Words were her plague and words were her redemption.”

“You can't live on nothing." "I can live on sunlight falling across little bridges. I can live on the Botticelli-blue cornflower pattern on the out-billowing garments of the attendant to Aphrodite and the pattern of strawberry blossoms and the little daisies in the robe of Primavera. I can live on the doves flying (he says) in cohorts from the underside of the faded gilt of the balcony of Saint Mark's cathedral and the long corridors of the Pitti Palace. I can gorge myself on Rome and the naked Bacchus and the face like a blasted lightning-blasted white birch that is some sort of Fury.”

“Writing. Love is writing.”

“We're incandescent and it doesn't seem fair." "Fair?" "I mean too much comes to some of us, not enought to all the rest of us. So few of us to do the thinking. I mean so few of us have to be so incandescent.”

“O do not weep, she says,for ages past I wasand I endure”

“I watch the white stars darken;the day comes and thewhite stars dimand lessenand the lights fade in the city.”

“...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?”