Louis MacNeice Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

Blind wantons like the gulls who scream
And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.

Louis MacNeice
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

Louis MacNeice
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me,
Otherwise kill me.

Louis MacNeice
It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

Louis MacNeice
It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

Louis MacNeice
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
When they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
My treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
My life when they murder by means of my
Hands, my death when they live me.

Louis MacNeice
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the clubfooted ghoul come near me.

Louis MacNeice
A city built upon mud;
A culture built upon profit;
Free speech nipped in the bud,
The minority always guilty.
Why should I want to go back
To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

Louis MacNeice
A fortress against ideas and against the
Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors
The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy
Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.

Louis MacNeice
Or will one's wife also belong to that country
And can one never find the perfect stranger?

Louis MacNeice
And I envy the intransigence of my own
Countrymen who shoot to kill and never
See the victim's face become their own
Or find his motive sabotage their motives.

Louis MacNeice
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

Louis MacNeice
I was the rector's son, born to the anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

Louis MacNeice
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church--
But let your poison be your cure.

Louis MacNeice
Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope,
And God Save--as you prefer--the King or Ireland.
The land of scholars and saints:
Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,
Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints

Louis MacNeice
Many people take to animals to escape from human beings - but often, it turns out, because they find the animals so human. Others, of whom I am one, find animals a delightful change just because they are not human and never can be.

Louis MacNeice
Why do we like being Irish? Partly because
It gives us a hold on the sentimental English
As members of a world that never was,
Baptized with fairy water

Louis MacNeice
Man's heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar.

Louis MacNeice
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse.

Louis MacNeice
None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives. Are self deceivers, but the worst of all Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy' And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.

Louis MacNeice
Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,

Louis MacNeice
Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go.

Louis MacNeice
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Louis MacNeice
So they were married—to be the more together—
And found they were never again so much together,
Divided by the morning tea,
By the evening paper,
By children and tradesmen's bills.

Louis MacNeice
All that I would like to be is human, having a share
in a civilized, articulate and well-adjusted
community where the mind is given its due
but the body is not distrusted

Louis MacNeice