Conrad Aiken Quotes
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Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!-But time goes on, and will, unheeding,Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.
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Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you:Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you:No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.Dreams-they are madness. Staring eyes-illusion.Let us return, hear music, and forget . . .
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And the shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leavesInterlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlightTo divide us forever.
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There, in the high bright window he dreams, and seesWhat we are blind to,-we who mass and crowdFrom wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.
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The young boy whistles, hurrying down the street,The young girl hums beneath her breath.One goes out to beauty, and does not know it.And one goes out to death.
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In one room, silently, lover looks upon lover,And thinks the air is fire.
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Time is a dream, he thinks, a destroying dream;It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.Where was the woman he loved? Where was his youth?Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire?Even a dream grows grey at last and falls.
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The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurryTo go our devious secret ways, forgettingThose many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed,We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves.The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.
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Music I heard with you was more than music,And bread I broke with you was more than bread;Now that I am without you, all is desolate;All that was once so beautiful is dead.
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Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked.And death was observed with sudden cries,And birth with laughter and pain.And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skiesAnd night came down again.
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Was forty, then, too old for work like this?Why should it be? He'd never been afraid-His eye was sure, his hand was steady . . .But dreams had meanings.
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Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!I am dissolved and woven again...Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.Thousands of voices weave in the rain.