Quotes to inspire and reflect

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers,

 

L’Angleterre, ah, la perfide Angleterre, que le rempart de ses mers rendait inaccessible aux Romains, la foi du Sauveur y est abordée. England, ah, faithless England, which the protection afforded by its seas rendered inaccessible to the Romans, the faith of the Saviour spread even there.

 

No coward soul is mine,

 

Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!

 

There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.

 

Every time a child says ‘I don’t believe in fairies’ there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

 

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

 

Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

 

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.

 

They carried him 2 not to bury him: They carried him down to crown him…. The poet flourished here, disheveled, Who would not bow before votive lamps But to the common spade.

 

I am Goya of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged till the craters of my eyes gape I am grief I am the tongue of war, the embers of cities on the snows of the year 1941 I am hunger

 

One-woman waterfall, she wears Her slow descent like a long cape And pausing, on the final stair Collects her motions into shape.

 

Well, my daddy left home when I was three, And didn’t leave much to Ma and me, Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now I don’t blame him because he run and hid, But the meanest thing he ever did was Before he left, he went and named me Sue.

 

Some alien blessing is on its way to us.

 

Like shadows of the plumbing that is all that is left of the great city.

 

I think I was cold in the womb.

 

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

 

The dead will think the living are worth it we will know Who we are And we will all enlist again.

 

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day.

 

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

 

You came back to us in a dream and we were not here.

 

America was promises… It was Man who had been promised.

 

We were the first that found that famous country: We marched by a king’s name: we crossed the sierras: Unknown hardships we suffered: hunger.

 

A poem should not mean But be.

 

And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on.

 

One by one forging his laws, to be flung Like horseshoes at the head, the eye, or the groin. And every killing is a treat For the broad-chested Ossete.

 

There with vast wings across the canceled skies, There in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

 

Petersburg! I still possess a list of addresses, Which will help me to hear the voices of the dead.

 

We live, deaf to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches, But where there’s so much as half a conversation The Kremlin’s mountaineer will get his mention.

 

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

 

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

 

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

 

great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.

 

For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.

 

A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.

 

I never saw a wild thing Sorry for itself.

 

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

 

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

 

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

 

It’s not the basic I that the poet is after but the essential you.

 

When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Though you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care.

 

Wayfarer, there is no way, you make the way as you go. As you go, you make the way and stopping to look behind, you see the path that your feet will never travel again. Wayfarer, there is no way— only foam trails in the sea.

 

So hopeless is the world without, The world within I doubly prize; Thy world, where guile and hate and doubt And cold suspicion never rise; Where thou and I and Liberty Have undisputed sovereignty.

 

There is not room for Death.

 

No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven’s glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

 

Yes, as my swift days near their goal, ’Tis all that I implore: In life and death a chainless soul, With courage to endure.

 

Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

 

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers From those brown hills have melted into spring.