Eleanor Farjeon Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

Cats sleep
Anywhere,
Any table,
Any chair,
Top of piano,
Window-ledge,
In the middle,
On the edge.

Eleanor Farjeon
The folks who their potatoes buy
From sacks before they sup,
Miss half of the potato's joy
And that's to dig it up.

Eleanor Farjeon
No love-story has ever been told twice. I never heard any tale of lovers that did not seem to me as new as the world on its first morning.

Eleanor Farjeon
He could not be captured,
He could not be bought,
His running was rhythm,
His standing was thought;
With one eye on sorrow
And one eye on mirth,
He galloped in heaven
And gambolled on earth. And only the poet
With wings to his brain
Can mount him and ride him
Without any rein,
The stallion of heaven,
The steed of the skies,
The horse of the singer
Who sings as he flies.

Eleanor Farjeon
King's Cross!
What shall we do?
His Purple Robe
Is rent in two!

Eleanor Farjeon
My harp and I a-wandering
Went over Snowdon Mountain,
From Anglesey to Swansea Bay
It sang like any fountain.

Eleanor Farjeon
We do not lose our friends when they die, we only lose sight of them.

Eleanor Farjeon
I will fight for you, yes, and you will fight for me. And if you have sacrificed joy and courage and beauty and wisdom for my sake, I will give them all to you again; and yet you must also give them to me, for they are things in which without you I am wanting. But together we can make them.

Eleanor Farjeon
Upon an Easter Morning,
So early in the day,
The organ in the chancel
Sang both grand and gay.

Eleanor Farjeon
The forest's afire!
The forest's afire!
The maple is burning,
The sycamore's turning
The beech is alight!

Eleanor Farjeon
I restore the primal line,
Stark and sturdy, frail and fine,
Of the Dryads in the sun.

Eleanor Farjeon
Romance gathers round an old story like lichen on an old branch. And the story of Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard is so old now — some say a year old, some say even two. How can the children be expected to remember?

Eleanor Farjeon
On Hallowe'en the old ghosts come about us, and they speak to some; to others they are dumb.

Eleanor Farjeon
In Arcady there lies a crystal spring
Ring'd all about with green melodious reeds
Swaying seal'd music up and down the wind.
Here on its time-defaced pedestal
The image of a half-forgotten God
Crumbles to its complete oblivion.

Eleanor Farjeon
Sweet the rain's new fall,
Sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dewfall
On the first grass.

Eleanor Farjeon
Dropt tears have hastened your decay
And brought you one step nigher death;
And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved,
The music of Love's golden breath
And seen the light in eyes that loved.
You think you hold the core and kernel
Of all the world beneath your crust,
Old dial? But when you lie in dust,
This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved.
Love is eternal.

Eleanor Farjeon
'In love there are no penalties and no payments, and what is given is indistinguishable from what is received.' And he bent his head and kissed her long and deeply, and in that kiss neither knew themselves, or even each other, but something beyond all consciousness that was both of them.

Eleanor Farjeon
Women are so strangely constructed that they have in them darkness as well as light, though it be but a little curtain hung across the sun. And love is the hand that takes the curtain down, a stronger hand than fear, which hung it up. For all the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love.

Eleanor Farjeon
Raise with elation,
Praise every morning
Spring's re-creation
Of the First Day!

Eleanor Farjeon
They who go in terror, friend,
Lose the lives they never spend.

Eleanor Farjeon
Every man's life (and … every woman's life), awaits the hour of blossoming that makes it immortal … love is a divinity above all accidents, and guards his own with extraordinary obstinacy.

Eleanor Farjeon
O evanescent temples built of man
To deities he honoured and dethroned!
Earth shoots a trail of her eternal vine
To crown the head that men have ceased to honour.
Beneath the coronal of leaf and lichen
The mocking smile upon the lips derides
Pan's lost dominion; but the pointed ears
Are keen and prick'd with old remember'd sounds.
All my breast aches with longing for the past!
Thou God of stone, I have a craving in me
For knowledge of thee as thou wert in old
Enchanted twilights in Arcadia.

Eleanor Farjeon
There's Carol like a rolling car, And Martin like a flying bird, And Adam like the Lord's First Word, And Raymond like the Harvest Moon, And Peter like a piper's tune, And Alan like the flowing on Of water. And there's John, like John.

Eleanor Farjeon
Bugsby's reach is long as time,
His reach is wide as wind is,
He can pick you nettles in Greenwich Marsh
And docks in the East Indies.

Eleanor Farjeon
The train stands still
And the world runs by.
Yonder runs a tree
And a cloud in the sky.

Eleanor Farjeon
It seems to me there are no rules, only instances; but perhaps that is because I learned no rules, and am only an instance myself.

Eleanor Farjeon
It's no use crying over spilt evils. It's better to mop them up laughing.

Eleanor Farjeon
Old sundial, you stand here for Time:
For Love, the vine that round your base
Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb
And lay one flower-capped spray in grace
Without the asking on your cold
Unsmiling and unfrowning face.

Eleanor Farjeon
His tail was a fountain.
His nostrils were caves.
His mane and his forelock
Were musical waves.
He neighed like a trumpet.
He cooed like a dove.
He was stronger than terror
And swifter than love.

Eleanor Farjeon
The world never knows, and cannot for the life of it imagine, what this man sees in that maid and that maid in this man. The world cannot think why they fell in love with each other. But they have their reason, their beautiful secret, that never gets told to more than one person; and what they see in each other is what they show to each other; and it is the truth. Only they kept it hidden in their hearts until the time came. And though you and I may never know why this lane is called Shelley's, to us both it will always be the greenest lane in Sussex, because it leads to the special secret I spoke of.

Eleanor Farjeon