Remarks by Hilda Doolittle | V2Melody Quotations

“We only want to forget the forked lightning.”

Condensing the desire to escape a painful and disruptive past into a vivid image · Memoir, End to Torment

“The years were immaterial. He liked my light summer dresses. Ezra was not consciously a love-image. But he lurked there, hid there, under the years.”

Reflecting on how an early attachment can remain hidden beneath decades of later experience · Memoir, End to Torment

“She is indeed rocks set in a blue sea, she is the sea itself, breaking and tortured and torturing, but never broken.”

Evoking Sappho as an enduring artistic presence shaped by suffering yet resistant to destruction · Essay, The Wise Sappho

“There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreciators we want.”

Locating the problem not in great art but in our capacity to perceive it · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“There is already enough beauty in the world of art, enough in the fragments and almost perfectly preserved charioteer at Delphi alone to remake the world.”

Claiming that existing works of beauty retain the power to transform human consciousness · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“All this was no inspiration, it was sheer, hard brain work.”

Rejecting romantic notions of effortless inspiration in favour of disciplined artistic labour · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“We must be in love before we can understand the mysteries of vision.”

Making love a prerequisite for the deepest forms of imaginative perception · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“That energy is always there but can be transmitted only to another body or another mind that is in sympathy with it, or keyed to the same pitch.”

Describing creative and emotional connection as a form of sympathetic resonance · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“The fruit tree and the human body are both receiving stations, capable of storing up energy, over-world energy.”

Imagining human beings and nature as receptive vessels for a larger creative energy · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“Perhaps so we cannot have the spirit without body, the body of nature, or the body of individual men and women.”

Rejecting a simple separation between spiritual life and material existence · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“We cannot have the heat without the lump of coal.”

Emphasising that spiritual or creative intensity depends upon physical existence · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“The body, I suppose, like a lump of coal, fulfils its highest function when it is being consumed.”

Using combustion as a metaphor for bodily expenditure in the creation of spiritual energy · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“Every man and woman is free to accept or deny life—to accept or reject this questionable gift—this thistle.”

Presenting engagement with life as a difficult but fundamental act of choice · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“To accept life—but that is dangerous. It is also dangerous not to accept life.”

Recognising that both embracing and refusing experience carry unavoidable risks · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“If you can not be seduced by beauty, you cannot learn the wisdom of ugliness.”

Arguing that an understanding of ugliness depends upon responsiveness to beauty · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“Flowers are made to seduce the senses: fragrance, form, colour.”

Recognising beauty as a direct appeal to physical perception · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“First you must read and enjoy with your body, and then try your intellect. Then your over-mind.”

Suggesting that reading begins in sensation before moving towards analysis and vision · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“But the world of the great creative artists is never dead.”

Affirming the continuing vitality of genuinely creative art · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“My sign-posts are not yours, but if I blaze my own trail, it may help to give you confidence.”

Encouraging others to discover their own paths through individual example · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“All men have possibilities of developing this vision.”

Presenting heightened perception as a human capacity rather than a rare gift · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“The love-brain and over-brain are both capable of thought. This thought is vision.”

Treating visionary insight as a genuine mode of thought · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“The brain and the womb are both centres of consciousness, equally important.”

Insisting on equal value for intellectual and embodied forms of knowledge · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“Vision is of two kinds—vision of the womb and vision of the brain.”

Describing visionary perception as both bodily and intellectual · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

“Should we be able to think with the womb and feel with the brain?”

Challenging conventional distinctions between intellect, emotion and the body · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

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