Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes
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The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
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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!
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A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
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It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.
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The soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.
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Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world - it is thin.
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God, I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on Thy heart.
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Music my rampart, and my only one.
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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.
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Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand;Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
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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.
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Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.
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Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,And lay them prone upon the earth and ceaseTo ponder on themselves, the while they stareAt nothing, intricately drawn nowhere.
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Parrots, tortoises and redwoods live a longer life than men do; Men a longer life than dogs do; Dogs a longer life than love does.
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Beauty is whatever gives joy.
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We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.
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After all, my earstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it was not love, Now that love is perished?
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My heart is warm with friends I make, And better friends I'll not be knowing, Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, No matter where it's going.
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The young are so old, they are born with their fingers crossed.
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Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.
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But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithless when I most am true.
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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.
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Love is not all: it is not meat nor drinkNor slumber nor a roof against the rain;Nor yet a floating spar to men that sinkAnd rise and sink and rise and sink again;Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;Yet many a man is making friends with deathEven as I speak, for lack of love alone.
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Not truth, but faith, it is that keeps the world alive.