Author Quotes

Spring is beautiful, and smells sweet. Spring is when you shake the curtains, and pound on the rugs, and take off your long underwear, and wash in all the corners.

The starres, bright cent'nels of the skies.

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark, where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel.

Every St. Patrick's Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to make a speech to.

It takes more than a short holiday to get a real love of Nature; such a love as makes trees like human companions, and green the colour we look for everywhere we go.

W. H. Davies
W. H. Davies
Certainly, before colonization, some of the greatest and most powerful and wealthiest and most technologically and intellectually advanced empires in the world were in Africa, from Ghana, Mali and Songhai...We're not taught about precolonial West Africa. We're not even taught about Africa today! [...] And I don't think we should focus on Europe because that is a demonstration to me of racism.

Ibram X. Kendi
Ibram X. Kendi
It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.

For just once in my life, I'd like to get through a whole week without having to deal with some fool, white or black, who's got an attitude about the way I look.

Art is a misleading, deceptive superstition; in it we think that we have before us the last, innermost essence of humanity itself; and yet, it merely foists upon us a beautiful product of man, in which are set down all of the egotistical, self-satisfying thoughts and emotions which remain sterile and ineffective in the world of action. And I, imbecile, esteem this product more highly than the human being himself, whom God has created.

The vast Pacific ocean would always remain the islanders' great solace, escape and nourishment, the amniotic fluid that would keep them hedonistic and aloof, guarded, gentle and mysterious.

A musician carries the music within him. He needs no specific instrument. he is the music.

A man and his dog is a sacred relationship. What nature hath put together let no woman put asunder.

Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books-they are dreams and knowledge, they are a future, and a past.

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special — these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

The house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace. Guests we've had stop in for a night or two all come down the first morning, ready to tell their dreams.

In a society that prates about, but seldom practices, communication, the craving to be listened to, heard, understood - which originates with the first terrified wail, the circling arms, the breast, the consolatory murmur - is hard to assuage.

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information.

It is not the great temptations that ruin us; it is the little ones.

They plucked communion tables down
And broke our painted glasses;
They threw our altars to the ground
And tumbled down the crosses.
They set up Cromwell and his heir—
The Lord and Lady Claypole—
Because they hated Common Prayer,
The organ and the maypole.

Life is large. We cannot possibly grasp the whole of it in the few years that we have to live. What is vital? What is essential? What may we profitably let go?

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane
Elinor Macartney Lane
For years a secret shame destroyed my peace—
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNeice.
But then I had a thought that brought me hope—
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.

The bloody Wolf, the Wolf does not pursue;
The Boar, though fierce, his Tusk will not embrue
In his own kind, Bears, not on Bears do prey:
Thou art then, Man, more savage far than they.

Anne Killigrew
Anne Killigrew
You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.

Railways and the Church have their critics, but both are the best ways of getting a man to his ultimate destination.