Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

135 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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