All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

— Stevie Smith

Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.

— Stevie Smith

But human beings must suffer, and must make suffering for themselves, and beat themselves up into spiritual frenzies, and oh death and desolation, and oh night space and horror, and oh keep my dream from me. And how very splendid it is that we can do all this to ourselves and have such a splendid and really ingenious gift for inflicting suffering upon ourselves. For suffering and strain are the gauge of life, and who wishes to live like a vegetable? But sometimes suffering measures life and ends it. And then it is not good at all. And between two people without knowing it a love may grow up, and a link may form, and no one knows or guesses.

— Stevie Smith

But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness forever....

— Stevie Smith

Children who paddle where the ocean bed shelves steeply Must take great care they do not, Paddle too deeply.'Thus, spake the awful aging couple Whose heart the years had turned to rubble. But the little children, to save any brother, Let it in at one ear and out at the other.

— Stevie Smith

God the Eater There is a god in whom I do not believe Yet to this god my love stretches, This god whom I do not believe in isms whole life, my life, and I am his. Everything that I have of pleasure and pain (Of pain, of bitter pain and men's contempt)I give this god for him to feed upon As he is my whole life, and I am his. When I am dead I hope that he will eat Everything I have been and have not been And crunch and feed upon it and grow fat Eating my life all up as it is his.

— Stevie Smith

Hope and desire, All unfulfilled, Have more than rope And hangman killed.

— Stevie Smith

If I lie down on my bed I must be here, But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.

— Stevie Smith

I'll have your heart, if not by gift my knife Shall carve it out. I'll have your heart, your life.

— Stevie Smith

I may be smelly, and I may be old, Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools, But where my fish float by I bless their swimming, And I like the people to bathe in me especially women.

— Stevie Smith