Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world — it is thin.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
It's not true that life is one damn thing after another—it's one damn thing over and over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day-time, and falling into at night.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
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 Millay
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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
God, I can push the grass apart,
And lay my finger on thy heart.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Women are
Superior to men in every way,
But chiefly in the intellect.

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
Sweep the floor, and sweep it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that and every day of your life; — if not that floor, why then — some other floor.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note In me a beauty that was never mine, How first you knew me in a book I wrote, How first you loved me for a written line....

Edna St. Vincent Millay
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
Death devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness—presently
Every bed is narrow.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.

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
And 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 death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
I know that Beauty must ail and die,
And will be born again, — but ah, to see
Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!
Oh, Autumn! Autumn! — What is the Spring to me?

Edna St. Vincent Millay
And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you all through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed, Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?- And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Birds that cannot even sing —
Dare to come again in spring!

Edna St. Vincent Millay
But you were something more than young and sweet And fair, - and the long year remembers you.

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
I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
"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
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Heap not on this mound
Roses that she loved so well;
Why bewilder her with roses,
That she cannot see or smell?

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
And all the loveliest things there be come simply, so it seems to me.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weeds uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

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