Edna St. Vincent Millay quotes
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“My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - it gives a lovely light!”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : A Few Figs from Thistles "First Fig" l. 1 (1920)
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“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St Vincent, Edna St. Vincent Millay (2013). “The Edna St. Vincent Millay Collection”, p.133, eBookIt.com
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“The soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : "Renascence" l. 207 (1917)
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“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Buck in the Snow (1928) "Dirge Without Music"
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“Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I am all the time talking about you, and bragging, to one person or another. I am like the Ancient Mariner, who had a tale in his heart he must unfold to all. I am always buttonholing somebody and saying, "Someday you must meet my mother."”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“And all the loveliest things there be come simply, so it seems to me.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Night falls fast. Today is in the past.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St. Vincent Millay (2003). “Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems”, p.201, Library of America
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“Lord I do fear / Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St. Vincent Millay (1952). “Letters”
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“Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Pour away despair and rinse the cup. Eat happiness like bread.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St. Vincent Millay (1956). “Collected Poems”, HarperCollins Publishers
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“Music my rampart, and my only one.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St. Vincent Millay (1956). “Collected Poems”, HarperCollins Publishers
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“April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand. Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning, but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“So up I got in anger, And took a book I had, And put a ribbon on my hair To please a passing lad. And, "One thing there's no getting by -- I've been a wicked girl," said I; But if I can't be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“I love humanity but I hate people.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St Vincent, Edna St. Vincent Millay (2013). “The Edna St. Vincent Millay Collection”, p.3, eBookIt.com
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“A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St. Vincent Millay (2013). “Early Poems”, p.17, Courier Corporation
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“Life must go on; I forget just why.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St Vincent, Edna St. Vincent Millay (2013). “The Edna St. Vincent Millay Collection”, p.176, eBookIt.com
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“Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Not Truth, but Faith it is that keeps the world alive.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“All my life, Following Care along the dusty road, Have I looked back on loveliness and sighed ....”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air. O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized! Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : Edna St. Vincent Millay (2003). “Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems”, p.68, Library of America
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“Beauty in all things-no, we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“The heart grows weary after a little Of what it loved for a little while.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Blessed be Death, that cuts in marble What would have sunk to dust!”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Life must go on, Though good men die.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Evil alone has oil for every wheel.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Oh, children, growing up to be Adventurers into sophistry, Forbear, forbear to be of those That read the rood to learn the rose.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Martyred many times must be Who would keep his country free.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I had a little sorrow, Born of a little sin.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I drank at every vine, the last was like the first. I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“You wrote me a beautiful letter, I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was. I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love... When you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to You.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak ...”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Lord, I do fear Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year My soul is all but out of me-let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Her lawn looks like a meadow, And if she mows the place She leaves the clover standing And the Queen Anne's Lace.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I am not afraid of lawyers as I used to be. They are lambs in wolves' clothing.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Should at that moment the full moon Step forth upon the hill, And memories hard to bear at noon, By moonlight harder still, Form in the shadows of the trees,-- Things that you could not spare And live, or so you thought, yet these All gone, and you still there, A man no longer what he was, Not yet the thing he planned...”
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“l am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Time can make soft that iron wood.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“She learned her hands in a fairy-tale, And her mouth on a valentine.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, And left the flushed print in a poppy there. I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one.”
-- Edna St. Vincent MillaySource : James M. Byrne, Francis Thompson (2001). “God: thoughts in an age of uncertainty”, Continuum Intl Pub Group
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“How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow . . . Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“[on going to Sunday school:] It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hay ricks and paper-covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars before Sunday school time.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“For the body at best Is a bundle of aches, Longing for rest; It cries when it wakes.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“The world stands out on either side, No wider than the heart is wide.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I screamed, and--lo!--Infinity Came down and settled over me”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“The younger generation forms a country of its own. It has no geographical boundaries. I've talked with young Hungarians in Budapest, with young Italians in Rome, with young Frenchmen in Paris, and with young people all over. ... These young people are going to do things. They are going to change things.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“I am not at all in favor of hard work for its own sake; many people who work very hard indeed produce terrible things, and should most certainly not be encouraged.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Oh, you mean I'm a homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what's that got to do with my headache?”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I am not a tentative person. Whatever I do, I give up my whole self to it ...”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I find that I never lose Bach. I don't know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Please don't think me negligent or rude. I am both, in effect, of course, but please don't think me either.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“it may be said of me by Harper & Brothers, that although I reject their proposals, I welcome their advances.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“After the feet of beauty fly my own.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Although we sometimes did without a few of life's necessities, we rarely lacked for its luxuries.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Life in itself / Is nothing, / An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. / It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“That is my being, the madness of an unaccustomed mood.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Tiresome heart, forever living and dying, House without air, I leave you and lock your door. Wild swans, come over the town, come over The town again, trailing your legs and crying!”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Earth does not understand her child, Who from the loud gregarious town Returns, depleted and defiled, To the still woods, to fling him down.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Dust in an urn long since, dispersed and dead Is great Apollo; and the happier he”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“On and on eternally Shall your altered fluid run, Bud and bloom and go to seed; But your singing days are done”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Death devours all lovely things; Lesbia with her sparrow Shares the darkness--presently Every bed is narrow.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard, Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Marriage...one of the most civilized institutions in the world...But...swimming is one of the most wonderful of sports, and yet there are always some people who cannot swim who insist on going into the water and getting drowned. Many people spoil marriage in a like manner. One should be sure she knows how to be married before rushing into it.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“If I could have two things in one: the peace of the grave, and the light of the sun.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“[L]ife isn't one thing after another, it's the same thing over and over”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“We think-although of course, now, we very seldom Clearly think- That the other side of War is Peace.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Strange how few, After alls said and done, the things that are Of moment.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Father, I beg of Thee a little task To dignify my days, 'tis all I ask.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I have loved badly, loved the great Too soon, withdrawn my words too late; And eaten in an echoing hall Alone and from a chipped plate The words that I withdrew too late.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“Man has never been the same since God died.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Not for the flag Of any land because myself was born there Will I give up my life. But I will love that land where man is free, And that will I defend.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Progress-progress is the dirtiest word in the language-who ever told us- And made us believe it-that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always A good idea?”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“Here's a song was never sung: Growing old is dying young.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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“When we are old and these rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning there remains No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, This be our solace: that it was not said When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“What terrible fear causes Man to address the Void as Thou?”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
“It's little I know what's in my heart,What's in my mind it's little I know,But there's that in me must up and start,And it's little I care where my feet go.”
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay -
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