I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of tomorrows,
a sky of tomorrows.
— Carl Sandberg (speaking of America)
Look at songs
Hidden in eggs.
— Carl Sandberg
Try to figure it out for yourself
remembering figures can lie
and liars can figure
and some promises are not worth
the paper they are written on.
— Carl Sandberg (speaking of war)
If the big houses with little families
And the little houses with big families
— Carl Sandberg
And this liar is an old one; we know him many years.
He is straight as a dog’s hind leg.
He is straight as a corkscrew.
He is white as a black cat’s foot at midnight.
— Carl Sandberg
The guns blew seven million off the map,
The guns sent seven million west.
Seven million shoving up the daises.
— Carl Sandberg
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — I asked
why men die for words.
…
Mother, Home, and Heaven — other older men with
face decorations said: God, Duty, Immortality
…
their say-so: and out of great Russia came three
dusty syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.
— Carl Sandberg
To those who had ordered them to death,
one of them said:
“We die because the people are asleep
and you will die because the people will awaken.”
— Carl Sandberg
Be perpendicular till the finish.
You will be horizontal long enough afterward
with toes shoving up the daises
— Carl Sandberg
The sea pulses under a skin of oil.
— Sylvia Plath (depicting scene in the harbor during winter)
They ring true, like good china.
— Sylvia Plath
I try to think of a place to hide you
As a desk drawer hides a poison pen letter — Sylvia Plath
My tears like vinegar — Sylvia Plath
of day-old bread and egg-stained plates — Sylvia Plath
while tulips bow like a college of cardinals
before the papal parago, the sun — Slyvia Plath
a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievable
as a tennis ball at twilight — Slyvia Plath
Always in the middle of a kiss
Came the profane stimulus to cough — Slyvia Plath
So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells — Slyvia Plath
the simple sum of heart plus heart — Slyvia Plath (regarding love)
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you — Sylvia Plath
Soldiers! Your come to this country to save the inhabitants from barbarism to bring civilization to the Orient and subtract this beautiful part of the world from the domination of England. From the top of the those pyramids, forty centuries are contemplating you.”
— Napoleon (Egypt campaign)
Fighting is a soldier’s religion; I never changed that. The other is the affair of women and priests. As for me, I always adopt the religion of the country I am in.”
— Napoleon
The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.
— Napoleon
If you make war, employ severity and activity; it is the only means by which you make it shorter, and consequently less deplorable for humanity.
— Napoleon
After a great battle, there is plenty of food for the crows and the bulletin-writers.”
— Captain Blaze (in Napoleon’s army)
I shall not bet the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheathe it.
— Czar Alexander, a determined opponent to Napoleon
Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow.”’
— Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962
Not that anybody is saying that these people
have now trouble.
Merely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner.
— Gwendolyn Brooks (difference between problems of poor and rich)
Still-am I good enough to die for them, is my blood bright
enough to be spilled,
— Gwendolyn Brooks (Black soldier facing racism)
Knowledge is strong but love is sweet;
Yea all the progress ye had made
Was to learn that all is small
Save love, for love is all in all.
— Christina Rossetti
My words were slow, my tears were few;
But through the dark my silence spoke
Like thunder.
— Christina Rossetti
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by
— Christina Rossetti
In short, people are exasperated by poetry which they understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort; just as an audience is offended by a speaker who talks over its head, and by a speaker whom it suspects of talking down to it.
— T.S. Elliot
Where terminology is loose, where we have not the vocabulary for distinctions which we feel, our only precision is found in being aware of the imperfection of our tools, and the different senses in which we are using the same words.
— T.S. Elliot
But yesterday’s gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.
— Larry McMurty (Lonesome Dove)
If you can dream — and not make dreams your master
…
If you meet with Triumph and Disaster
And threat those two impostors just the same
…
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
…
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!
— Rudyard Kipling (excepts from If — )
Because, for all our power and weight and size,
We are nothing more than children of your brain!
— Rudyard Kipling (regarding machines)
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven —
All’s right with the world!
— Robert Browning
“They ran like hares; we have broken them up like firewood;
They fought against God.”
— W.H. Auden
With his sapper’s skill,
Muttering to his fuses in a tunnel “Could I meet here with Love,
I would hug him to death.”
— W.H. Auden
Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain’s lovely head
Whose white waterfalls could bless
Travellers in their last distress.
— W.H. Auden (describing an avalanche)
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
— W.H. Auden
The old woman confessing: “He that I loved the
Best, to him I was worst,”
— W.H. Auden
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The name is catching and will not stop
Dance till the stars come down with the rafters
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
— W.H. Auden
“When there was peace, he was for peace, when there was war, he went.”
— W.H. Auden
Their’s not to make replay,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but do do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
— Lord Tennyson (Famous battle in the Crimean war where British soldiers were against massive odds and bravely fought on. Only 195 of the 600 returned alive.)
Then the world were not so bitter
But a smile could make it sweet.
— Lord Tennyson
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
— Lord Tennyson
And the cobweb woven across the cannon’s throat
Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more.
— Lord Tennyson (regarding a dream of peace)
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
— Lord Tennyson
Be large as an owl, be slick as a frog,
Be good as a goose, be big as a dog,
Be sleek as a heifer, be long as a hog, —
— Thoedore Roethke
The several sounds were low;
The river ebbed and flowed:
Desire was winter-calm
A moon away.
— Thoedore Roethke
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
— Thoedore Roethke (when hearing of a tragic death of a former student)
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to hear,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
— Ezra Pound
ALBA
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
— Ezra Pound
I dry my shirt in the wind,
and my opened heard.
The sky falls
and falls.
From my glass,
I drink
pure joy.
— Pablo Neruda
No matter what you might think, the real problem is never a lack of pity. Nothing breaks here more readily than the heart.
— Paul Aster (from “In the Country of Last Things”)
’Tis all that I implore —
Through life and death, a chainless soul
With courage to endure!
— Emily Bronte
To die — and die so far away
When life has hardly smiled for me.
— Emily Bronte (a young soldier’s death)
’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.
— Emily Bronte
If thou hast sinned in this world of care,
’Twas but the dust of thy drear abode —
Thy soul was pure when it entered her,
And pure it will go again to God.
— Emily Bronte
Yet my heart loves December’s smile
As much as July’s golden beam
— Emily Bronte
But could the day seem dark to me
Because the night was fair?
— Emily Bronte
Thou are love and life! Oh, come,
Make once more my heart thy home
— Emily Bronte
My check is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast; —
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.
— Percy Shelley
And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.
— Percy Shelley
Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.
— Thomas Jefferson
…whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without governments. I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
— Thomas Jefferson
The motion of my blood no longer keeps time with the tumult of the world.
— Thomas Jefferson
And like the murmur of a dream,
I hear her breathe my name.
— Samuel Coleridge
To snow that falls upon a river
A moment white — then gone for ever!
— Robert Burns
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that’s best dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes
— Lord Byron
My soul has more fire than you have ashes!
My heart has more love than you have dark!
— Victor Hugo
It snowed more still. The wind
out of the arctic sizzled; through strange country
slippery with pink ice, the barefoot soldiers
walked on without bread.
— Victor Hugo (regarding Napolean’s disastrous Russian campaign)
This I know, fruit falls into the wind that jolts it.
The bird loses her feather, the flower her scent.
Your whole creation is a vast wheel
which to turn at all must crush someone.
A month, a day, a tide, a tear on a human face,
all fade under the blue sky.
Grass must sprout and children drown —
I know this well, my Lord!
— Victor Hugo (after a loss of his beloved daughter)
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.
— John Donne
Protect me, O Lord;
My boat is so small,
And your sea is so big.
— Traditional Breton Prayer
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
— William Wordsworth
Though nothing can bring
back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower
— William Wordsworth
I did but touch the honey of romance —
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?
— Oscar Wilde
O wandering graves! O restless sleep!
O silence of the sunless day!
Give up your prey! Give up your prey!
— Oscar Wilde
Yet when the fiery web is spun,
Her watchmen shall descry from far
The young Republic like a sun
Rise from these crimson seas of war.
— Oscar Wilde (on Great Britain’s bloody naval battles)
That France hath kissed the mouth of Liberty,
And found it sweeter than his honied bees,
And that the giant wave Democracy
Breaks on the shores where Kinds lay couched at ease.
— Oscar Wilde
Rich autumn time, the season’s usurer,
Will lend his hoarded gold to all the trees,
And see his treasure scattered by the wild and spendthrift breeze.
— Oscar Wilde
The kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air.
— Oscar Wilde
Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale,
Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
That high in heaven she is hung so far
She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune
— Oscar Wilde
Nor withers till the rose has flamed to red,
And in the autumn purple violets blow,
And the slim crocus stirs the winter snow;
Wherefore yon leafless trees will bloom again
And this grey land grow green with summer rain
— Oscar Wilde
Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn
We lose too soon, and only find delight
In withered husks of some dead memory.
— Oscar Wilde
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
— Oscar Wilde
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalte ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.
— Oscar Wilde (regarding an execution of a prisoner)
Adieu! Adieu! yon silver lamp, the moon,
Which turns our midnight into perfect noon,
Doth surely light thy towers, guarding well
Where Dante sleeps, where Byron loved to dwell
— Oscar Wilde
Lightly, O lightly we bear her along,
She sways like a flower in the wind of our song;
She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream,
She floats light a laugh from the lips of a dream.
Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing
— Sarojini Naidu
Pushed into nothingness by a breath,
And quench in a wreath
Of engulfing death
This fight for a God, or this devil’s game.
— Amy Lowell
How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!
— Amy Lowell
My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.
— Amy Lowell
May you walk with beauty before you,
beauty behind you, all around you, and
The Most Great Beauty keep you His concern.
— Robert Hayden
The era closes and large children hang their stockings
and build a black memorial to you.
And you, you fade out of sight
like a lost signalman
wagging his lantern
for the train that comes no more.
— Anne Sexton
Be sure you’re not completely wrong, then go ahead.
— Davy Crockett
Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.
— Ogden Nash
And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never
been an era when so many things were going so right for so
many of the wrong persons.
— Ogden Nash
For a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost…Not til we are lost…do we begin to find ourselves.
— Henry David Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
— Henry David Thoreau
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days!
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.
— Sir Walter Raleigh (before his execution)
Trust like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth
— Milton
Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,
Long I’ve been tossed like the driven foam:
But now, proud world! I’m going home.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The rain comes when the wind calls;
The river knows the way to the sea;
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity;
The sea tosses and foams to find
It’s way up to the cloud and wind;
The shadow sits close to the flying ball;
The date fails not on the palm-tree tall;
And thou, — go burn they wormy pages, —
Shalt out see seers, and outwit sages.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Do not fear fear)
These are but seeds of days,
Not yet a steadfast morn,
An intermittent blaze,
An embryo god unborn.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
