Top 120 Dylan Thomas Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything – you wouldn’t think that such a place as San Francisco could exist.”

— Dylan Thomas

52. “Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.”

— Dylan Thomas

53. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.”

— Dylan Thomas

54. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

55. “The ball I threw while playing in the park has not yet reached the ground.”

— Dylan Thomas

56. “Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies.”

— Dylan Thomas

57. “I love you so much I’ll never be able to tell you; I’m frightened to tell you. I can always feel your heart. Dance tunes are always right: I love you body and soul: – and I suppose body means that I want to touch you and be in bed with you, and i suppose soul means that i can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake.”

— Dylan Thomas

58. “Join the army and see the next world.”

— Dylan Thomas

59. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

60. “My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”

— Dylan Thomas

61. “The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.”

— Dylan Thomas

62. “Let the dry eyes perceive Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.”

— Dylan Thomas

63. “A good poem is a contribution to reality.”

— Dylan Thomas

64. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

65. “The photograph is married to the eye, Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth...”

— Dylan Thomas

66. “Sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless, salt and brown, like two old kippers in a box.”

— Dylan Thomas

67. “Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

— Dylan Thomas

68. “My birthday began with the water – Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name.”

— Dylan Thomas

69. “And from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts Into the stony idiom of the brain...”

— Dylan Thomas

70. “Out of the sighs a little comes, But not of grief, for I have knocked down that Before the agony; the spirit grows, Forgets, and cries; A little comes, is tasted and found good...”

— Dylan Thomas

71. “The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.”

— Dylan Thomas

72. “I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.”

— Dylan Thomas

73. “Call me Dolores. Like they do in the stories.”

— Dylan Thomas

74. “Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels...”

— Dylan Thomas

75. “In the beginning was the word, the word That from the solid bases of the light Abstracted all the letters of the void...”

— Dylan Thomas

76. “In the beginning was the secret brain. The brain was celled and soldered in the thought.”

— Dylan Thomas

77. “Into the sea of yourself like a young dog, and bring out a pearl.”

— Dylan Thomas

78. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

79. “And on seesaw Sunday nights, I’d woo who ever I would with my wicked eye!”

— Dylan Thomas

80. “I like to think of poetry as statements made on the way to the grave.”

— Dylan Thomas

81. “Come on up, boys -I’m dead.”

— Dylan Thomas

82. “There are always Uncles at Christmas.”

— Dylan Thomas

83. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

84. “The function of posterity is to look after itself.”

— Dylan Thomas

85. “I sang in my chains like the sea.”

— Dylan Thomas

86. “Washington isn’t a city, it’s an abstraction.”

— Dylan Thomas

87. “The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be “comic” about it.”

— Dylan Thomas

88. “This is the world: the lying likeness of Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move Loving and being loth; The dream that kicks the buried from their sack And lets their trash be honoured as the quick. This is the world. Have faith.”

— Dylan Thomas

89. “Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?”

— Dylan Thomas

90. “There is only one po- sition for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.”

— Dylan Thomas

91. “Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas.”

— Dylan Thomas

92. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

93. “It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.”

— Dylan Thomas

94. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

95. “Life is a terrible thing, thank God.”

— Dylan Thomas

96. “Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.”

— Dylan Thomas

97. “All world was one, one windy nothing, My world was christened in a stream of milk.”

— Dylan Thomas

98. “And the whole pain flows open and I die.”

— Dylan Thomas

99. “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.”

— Dylan Thomas

100. “To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas if I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.”

— Dylan Thomas