Stephen Spender Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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I wear your kiss like a feather
Laid upon my cheek

Stephen Spender
History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Stephen Spender
Who live under the shadow of a war,
What can I do that matters?

Stephen Spender
Their collected
Hearts wound up with love, like little watch springs.

Stephen Spender
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.

Stephen Spender
I say, stamping the words with emphasis,
Drink from here energy and only energy

Stephen Spender
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Stephen Spender
They think how one life hums, revolves and toils,
One cog in a golden singing hive...

Stephen Spender
No One
Shall Hunger: Man shall spend equally.
Our Goal Which We Compel: Man shall be man.

Stephen Spender
There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.

Stephen Spender
What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away

Stephen Spender
Whatever happens, I shall never be alone,
I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.

Stephen Spender
For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust

Stephen Spender
Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.

Stephen Spender
My parents kept me from children who were rough
And who threw words like stones and who wore torn clothes.

Stephen Spender
At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle
Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.

Stephen Spender
Our single purpose was to walk through snow
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass iron.

Stephen Spender
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time's suspended blank.

Stephen Spender
I fear I cannot make an amusing speech. I have just been reading a book which says that 'all geniuses are devoid of humour'.

Stephen Spender
People sometimes divide others into those you laugh at and those you laugh with. The young Auden was someone you could laugh-at-with.

Stephen Spender
All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.

Stephen Spender
After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.

Stephen Spender
Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.

Stephen Spender
Being a minor poet is like being minor royalty. And no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that.

Stephen Spender
My single pair of eyes
Contain the universe they see;
Their mirrored multiplicity
Is packed into a hollow body
Where I reflect the many, in my one.'

Stephen Spender
When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,
I was your son, high on your horse,
My mind a top whipped by the lashes
Of your rhetoric, windy of course.

Stephen Spender
Since we are what we are, what shall we be
But what we are? We are, we have
Six feet and seventy years, to see
The light, and then resign it for the grave.

Stephen Spender
Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon's fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses...

Stephen Spender
I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

Stephen Spender
Across this dazzling
Mediterranean
August morning
The dolphins write such
Ideograms:
With power to wake
Me prisoned in
My human speech
They sign: 'I AM!'

Stephen Spender