Quotes to inspire and reflect

And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?

Who will remember, passing through this gate, The unheroic dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate— Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I’d toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.

Soldiers are citizens of death’s gray land.

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. 1

Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life.

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, The green casque has outdone your elegance.

Crises of expression and spasms of eros: that’s the man of today, the inside a vacuum, the continuity of personality provided by his suit, which with stout cloth might be good for ten years.

No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none? First came the seen, then thus the palpable What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. “And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.”

With Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting.

Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later… some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some, pro patria, walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, the unbelieving came home, home to a lie.

There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.

Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase!

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles.

For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date.

Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm. 1

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

All men by their nature give praise.

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned.

Then back to the party! and femaled you jealously as if to discover whence and there should escape, what?

are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.

It’s the anarchy of poverty delights me.

Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails they glide to the wind tossing green water from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls.

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

In summer the song sings itself above the muffled words—

As the rain falls so does bathe every object of the world—

Say it, no ideas but in things.

The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit of uselessness which delights them—

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth

The pure products of America go crazy—

From the petal’s edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact—

They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.

By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast—a cold wind.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.

I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them.

I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor.

Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?