Top 40 Ted Hughes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You are who you choose to be.”

— Ted Hughes

2. “Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen. Night passed.”

— Ted Hughes

3. “The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.”

— Ted Hughes

4. “Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.”

— Ted Hughes

5. “The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.”

— Ted Hughes

6. “What happens in the heart, simply happens.”

— Ted Hughes

7. “The only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldy enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”

— Ted Hughes

8. “Where white is black and black is white, I won.”

— Ted Hughes

9. “Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.”

— Ted Hughes

10. “What happened casually remains -.”

— Ted Hughes

11. “He could not stand. It was not That he could not thrive, he was born With 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

12. “With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.”

— Ted Hughes

13. “The brassy wood-pigeons Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun Rises upon a world well-tried and old.”

— Ted Hughes

14. “What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”

— Ted Hughes

15. “Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast.”

— Ted Hughes

16. “It took the whole of Creation to produce my foot, my each feather: now I hold Creation in my foot.”

— Ted Hughes

17. “The wolf is living for the earth.”

— Ted Hughes

18. “The 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

19. “He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag. He was what his brain could make nothing of.”

— Ted Hughes

20. “Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.”

— Ted Hughes

21. “Haven’t you heard of the music of the spheres?” asked the dragon. “It’s the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I’m a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful.”

— Ted Hughes

22. “You could become internationally famous – you’re Gemini, and according to antique authority have a literary talent, which of course your letters prove.”

— Ted Hughes

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

— Ted Hughes

24. “So 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

25. “The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.”

— Ted Hughes

26. “The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it.”

— Ted Hughes

27. “But who is stronger than death? Me, evidently .”

— Ted Hughes

28. “Applause is the beginning of abuse.”

— Ted Hughes

29. “I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.”

— Ted Hughes

30. “It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly – I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads – The allotment of death.”

— Ted Hughes

31. “In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.”

— Ted Hughes

32. “Do as you like with me. I’m your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.”

— Ted Hughes

33. “The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.”

— Ted Hughes

34. “I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars...”

— Ted Hughes

35. “The world’s decay where the wind’s hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust.”

— Ted Hughes

36. “The Shell The sea fills my ear with sand and with fear. You may wash out the sand, but never the sound of the ghost of the sea that is haunting me.”

— Ted Hughes

37. “Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.”

— Ted Hughes

38. “The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess?”

— Ted Hughes

39. “That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.”

— Ted Hughes

40. “I 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

41. “Your journal pages. Your effort to cry words.”

— Ted Hughes

42. “The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.”

— Ted Hughes

43. “The Bush administration doesn’t particularly like public participation. It makes them look bad.”

— Ted Hughes

44. “In 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

45. “And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.”

— Ted Hughes

46. “As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.”

— Ted Hughes

47. “The 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

48. “How could Fate stage a scenario so symbolic without having secreted the tragedy ending and the ironic death?”

— Ted Hughes