Ted Hughes Quotes

Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span, Protracted with sorrow from day to day, Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Life is an incurable disease.

To have a body is to suffer.

I'm just a guy. If you hit me, I hurt, and if you cut me, I bleed.

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.

Fear was the knowledge of pain, the awareness that you could be hurt, that you could die.

Nietzsche famously said "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But what he failed to stress is that it almost kills you.

We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.

Acting is, to me now, artificial. Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' " - 'Joy of Life

We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

We're all damaged somehow."-A Great and Terrible Beauty

I really have no idea where the darkness comes from. Other writers have said that there are two subjects worth writing about, love and death; and since I'm a complete flop when it comes to love, I chose death. Too, maybe because of where I came from, I do find it easy to empathise with and write about certain groups of damaged or downtrodden people: the poor, the addicted.

We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.

To be alive is to be vulnerable.

Sometimes people do get hurt

And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on.

We are all frail-embodied creatures, who at times suffer through injustice, abuse, illness, pain and misfortune.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

This is the Hour of Lead- Remembered, if outlived, As freezing persons, recollect the Snow- First-Chill-then Stupor- then the letting go---

Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live.