Elinor Wylie Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my Puritan inheritance, I suppose.

Elinor Wylie
In masks outrageous and austere The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.

Elinor Wylie
If any have a stone to throw
It is not I, ever or now.

Elinor Wylie
Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
The spring begins before the winter's over.

Elinor Wylie
We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.

Elinor Wylie
When strawberries go begging, and the sleek
Blue plums lie open to the blackbird's beak,
We shall live well--we shall live very well.

Elinor Wylie
The bird Imagination, That flies so far, that dies so soon; Her wings are colored like the sun, Her breast is colored like the moon.

Elinor Wylie
I shall lie folded like a saint,
Lapped in a scented linen sheet,
On a bedstead striped with bright-blue paint,
Narrow and cold and neat.

Elinor Wylie
My lord, adjudge my strength, and set me where
I bear a little more than I can bear.

Elinor Wylie
Honeyed words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

Elinor Wylie
I have never cared very deeply about the actual taste of my work. Let its essential odor satisfy my mind and senses, and I am content. I rarely judge by the grosser test of actual gustation... in cooking, to create a masterpiece for the nose alone — that is exquisite, that is Art!

Elinor Wylie
The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

Elinor Wylie
I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish.

Elinor Wylie
The months between the cherries and the peaches
Are brimming cornucopias which spill
Fruits red and purple...

Elinor Wylie
Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird
The eagle of the rock.

Elinor Wylie
I've played the traitor over and over;
I'm a good hater but a bad lover.

Elinor Wylie
Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There's something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.

Elinor Wylie
The worst and best are both inclined To snap like vixens at the truth; But, O, beware the middle mind That purrs and never shows a tooth!

Elinor Wylie
If you would keep your soul From spotted sight or sound, Live like the velvet mole; Go burrow underground. And there hold intercourse With roots of trees and stones, With rivers at their source, And disembodied bones.

Elinor Wylie
I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

Elinor Wylie