Ken Poirot Quotes

“You have not lived until you have fled a city in a country where you do not speak the language in the middle of the night.”

“I fled Him down the nights and down the daysI fled Him down the arches of the yearsI fled Him down the labyrinthine waysOf my own mind, and in the midst of tearsI hid from him, and under running laughter.”

“Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.”

“Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”

“His body and his soul appeared to have the strange ability to repel the hours, just as, inversely, a magnet attracts metal. Everything spun about him and fled; he was always the sole centre of an enormous circumference. He kept moving forwards, body and soul, in the hope of coming close to what fled at his approach. The same thing happened with time – his position remained constant in relation to the thing which, however hard he tried to clasp it to him, stole away from him and bounded into the distance. He was the one who had no incriminating papers in his drawers, who could show his diary to anyone. He was a creator. Perhaps that was why his life did not exist”

“The battle fever. He had never thought to experience it himself, though Jamie had told him of it often enough. How time seemed to blur and slow and evenstop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even you body. "You don't feel your wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat running down into your eyes. You stop feeling you stop thinking, you stop being you, there is only the fight , the foe, this man and then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you're not, you're alive, and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them laughing." Battle fever. I am half a man and drunk with slaughter, let them kill me if they can!”

“Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.”

“Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.”

“...you ask me why I compare you to stars - it's simple - that's where your goddess has fled...”

“Poverty fled, she who gives birth to virile men.”