Quotes by British Authors - Page 747

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
George Orwell
I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?
Christina Rossetti
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.
Anne Bradstreet
And marbled clouds go scudding byThe many-steepled London sky.
John Betjeman
You will come away bruised.You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?
Emily Brontë
A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.
Jeanette Winterson
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T.S Eliot
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
John Keats
Everything is all right,When you’re here,When you’re right next to me,When my hand is in yours,Don’t leave me,Don’t leave me empty handed.
Elizabeth Brooks
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
Rudyard Kipling
Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.
Joyce Cary
If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.
Neil Gaiman
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!
Alfred Tennyson
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
William Wordsworth
The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice.
D.H. Lawrence
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Alexander Pope
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted
Percy Bysshe Shelley
When from our better selves we have too longBeen parted by the hurrying world, and droop,Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,How gracious, how benign, is Solitude
William Wordsworth
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
Virginia Woolf
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
David Byrne
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
W.H. Auden
I really don't know what "I love you" means.I think it means "Don't leave me here alone.
Neil Gaiman
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
George Eliot
In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, Snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.
Christina Rossetti
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
Robert Browning
LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.
T.S Eliot
She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;And all that’s best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes:Thus mellow’d to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.One shade the more, one ray the less,Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet expressHow pure, how dear their dwelling-place.And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,The smiles that win, the tints that glow,But tell of days in goodness spent,A mind at peace with allA heart whose love is innocent!
George Gordon Byron
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
Virginia Woolf
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
Virginia Woolf
The night has a thousand eyes,And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one: Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.
Francis William Bourdillon
The stars are forth, the moon above the topsOf the snow-shining mountains.—Beautiful!I linger yet with Nature, for the nightHath been to me a more familiar faceThan that of man; and in her starry shadeOf dim and solitary loveliness,I learn'd the language of another world.
George Gordon Byron
To the Virgins, To Make much of TimeGather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today,tTomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,tThe higher he’s a-getting,The sooner will his race be run,tAnd nearer he is to setting.That age is best which is the first,tWhen youth and blood are warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worsttTimes still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time,tAnd while you may, go marry;For having lost but once your prime,tYou may for ever tarry.
Robert Herrick
Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...
Aleister Crowley
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
There is no Space or TimeOnly intensity, And tame thingsHave no immensity
Mina Loy
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;tThey called me the hyacinth girl.'t —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,t Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could nott Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neithert Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,t Looking into the heart of light, the silence.t Od' und leer das Meer.
T.S Eliot
To see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake
The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher's knife.
William Blake
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I don’t think that I’ve been in love as suchAlthough I liked a few folk pretty wellLove must be vaster than my smiles or touchfor brave men died and empires rose and fellFor love, girls follow boys to foreign landsand men have followed women into hellIn plays and poems someone understandsthere’s something makes us more than blood and boneand more than biological demands For me love’s like the wind, unseen, unknownI see the trees are bending where it’s beenI know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blownI really don’t know what "I love you" meansI think it means "don’t leave me here alone
Neil Gaiman
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.
Matthew Arnold
September has come, it is hersWhose vitality leaps in the autumn,Whose nature prefersTrees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.So I give her this month and the nextThough the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered alreadySo many of its days intolerable or perplexedBut so many more so happy.Who has left a scent on my life, and left my wallsDancing over and over with her shadowWhose hair is twined in all my waterfallsAnd all of London littered with remembered kisses.
Louis MacNeice
Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Andrew Marvell
Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove
Christopher Marlowe
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for awhile, then closesWithin a dream.
Ernest Dowson
McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry. Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.McGough: Really? When?Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time ...
Graham Chapman
My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carried on my backthe poetry I had read.So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met.From my shirt on the back of the chairI learn tonighthow many yearsof learning by heartI waited for you.
John Berger
Uncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what I am.
Philip Larkin
For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
William Wordsworth
The world was fair, the mountains tallIn Elder Days before the fall...
J.R.R. Tolkien
You are always new. THe last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you pass'd my window home yesterday, I was fill'd with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time...Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you.
John Keats
I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me- who knows how?To thy chamber-window, Sweet!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.” “And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth impatiently. “There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!” “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy. “Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.
Jane Austen
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
Charles Dickens