Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
Cold of the sun's eclipse When cocks crow for the first time hapless, and dogs in kennel howl Abandoning the richly-stinking bone, And the star at the edge of the shamed and altered sun shivers alone, And over the pond the bat but not the swallow dips And out comes the owl.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Earth does not understand her child,
Who from the loud gregarious town
Returns, depleted and defiled,
To the still woods, to fling him down.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts... they lie unquestioned, uncombined, Wisdom enough to leach us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Oh, children, growing up to be Adventurers into sophistry, Forbear, forbear to be of those That read the rood to learn the rose.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak...

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Not for the flag Of any land because myself was born there Will I give up my life. But I will love that land where man is free, And that will I defend.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Her lawn looks like a meadow, And if she mows the place She leaves the clover standing And the Queen Anne's Lace.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more! Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore! And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me, I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly That I might eat again, and met thy sneers With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,...

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Should at that moment the full moon Step forth upon the hill, And memories hard to bear at noon, By moonlight harder still, Form in the shadows of the trees,-- Things that you could not spare And live, or so you thought, yet these All gone, and you still there, A man no longer what he was, Not yet the thing he planned...

Edna St. Vincent Millay
The heart grows weary after a little Of what it loved for a little while.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
For the body at best
Is a bundle of aches,
Longing for rest;
It cries when it wakes.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
If I could have two things in one: the peace of the grave, and the light of the sun.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Beauty in all things-no, we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,
Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure

Edna St. Vincent Millay
I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My sorrow, into something I can bear.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Time does not forfeit; Time does not abstain;
The future in one fist, he eats the past.
I know this; yet again and yet again
I try to hold the present, make it last
One moment, that the simple great be slain
Not unperceived. No hope — Time eats so fast.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning;

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay