Mary Elizabeth Coleridge Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,
Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art?
Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,
Thou little heart?

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Egypt's might is tumbled down
Down a-down the deeps of thought;
Greece is fallen and Troy town,
Glorious Rome hath lost her crown,
Venice' pride is nought.
But the dreams their children dreamed
Fleeting, unsubstantial, vain
Shadowy as the shadows seemed
Airy nothing, as they deemed,
These remain.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
We were young, we were merry, we were very, very wise, And the door stood open at our feast, When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes, And a man with his back to the East.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
The fruits of the tree of Knowledge are various; he must be strong indeed who can digest all of them.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
How often one talks not to hear what the other person has got to say, but to hear what one has got to say oneself!

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Others may woo thee, Sleep; so will not I.
Dear is each minute of my conscious breath,
Hard fate, that, ere the time be come to die,
Myself, to live, must nightly mimic death.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Where is delight? and what are pleasures now?—
Moths that a garment fret.
The world is turned memorial, crying, "Thou
Shalt not forget!"

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Breathe slumbrous music round me, sweet and slow,
To honied phrases set!
Into the land of dreams I long to go.
Bid me forget!

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Eyes, what are they? Colored glass,
Where reflections come and pass.
Open windows — by them sit
Beauty, Learning, Love, and Wit.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Strange Power, I know not what thou art,
Murderer or mistress of my heart.
I know I'd rather meet the blow
Of my most unrelenting foe
Than live — as now I live — to be
Slain twenty times a day by thee.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
The brain's asleep before its time.
I would that thou hadst died outright,
And I had seen thee, in thy prime,
Go half to darkness, half to light!

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Grief, I have cursed thee often — now at last
To hate thy name I am no longer free;
Caught in thy bony arms and prisoned fast,
I love no love but thee.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge