Walter de La Mare Quotes
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Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do.
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Hi! handsome hunting man Fire your little gun. Bang! Now the animal is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!
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When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.
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Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.
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His brow is seamed with line and scar; His cheek is red and dark as wine; The fires as of a Northern star Beneath his cap of sable shine. His right hand, bared of leathern glove, Hangs open like an iron gin, You stoop to see his pulses move, To hear the blood sweep out and in. He looks some king, so solitary In earnest thought he seems to stand, As if across a lonely sea He gazed impatient of the land. Out of the noisy centuries The foolish and the fearful fade; Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes, Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed.
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It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.
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Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer's day.
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Do diddle di do, Poor Jim Jay Got stuck fast In Yesterday.
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His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, The waters of no-more-pain; His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, "Rest, rest, and rest again.
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He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.
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God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.
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Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.
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The only catalogue of this world's goods that really counts is that which we keep in the silence of the mind.
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What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky.
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Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever - even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body
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When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, And all her lovelier things even lovelier grow; Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies. When music sounds, out of the water rise Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes, Rapt in strange dream burns each enchanted face, With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place. When music sounds, all that I was I am Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came; And from Time's woods break into distant song The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.
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A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast Sorrow was there The sweet cheat gone.
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Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business... Illumined by the imagination, our life, whatever its defeats - is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.