Louis MacNeice Short Quotes

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Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go.

Louis MacNeice
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louis MacNeice
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its net of gold.

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

Louis MacNeice
It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Louis MacNeice
It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
O early one morning I walked out like Agag,
Early one morning to walk through the fire
Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements
With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire.

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
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
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
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing.

Louis MacNeice