Quotes by Wilfred Owen

• All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.
• All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.
• All a poet can do today is warn.
• A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.
• After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.
• Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
• I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.
• Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.
• Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.
• Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
• Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.
• I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?
• I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
• I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.
• My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
• Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.
• She is elegant rather than belle.
• The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.
• The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.
• Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.
• When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to-it leaves nothing.
• If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.