Top 100 Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes
#1. On and on eternally
Shall your altered fluid run,
Bud and bloom and go to seed;
But your singing days are done
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#2. But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair, - and the long year remembers you.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#4. The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted-
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#5. But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#7. Let us not forget such words, and all they mean, as hatred, bitterness, and rancor greed, intolerance, bigotry; let us renew our faith and pledge to man, his right to be himself and free.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#9. Lost in Hell,-Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee;
Say to her, My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#12. What can I give for
Your knowledge
Of when to expand
And when to contract -
This instructed, more academic college
Of when to act?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#18. And as it went my tortured soul
(...) That all about me swirled the dust.
Deep in the earth I rested now,
Cool is its hands upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#19. All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#21. The Englishman foxtrots as he fox-hunts, with all his being, through thickets, through ditches, over hedges, through chiffons, through waiters, over saxophones, to the victorious finish; and who goes home depends on how many the ambulance will accommodate.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#22. When I can make Of ten small words a rope to hang the world! I had you and I have you now no more.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#25. Her lawn looks like a meadow, And if she mows the place She leaves the clover standing And the Queen Anne's Lace.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#26. If I love you Wednesday, What is that to you? I do not love you Thursday - so much is true.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#27. So up I got in anger, And took a book I had, And put a ribbon on my hair To please a passing lad. And, "One thing there's no getting by
I've been a wicked girl," said I; But if I can't be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#28. When you publish something, it is very much as if you pulled your pants down in public. If what you have written is good, nobody can hurt you; if what you have written is bad, nobody can help you.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#29. One things there's no getting by,
I've been a wicked girl,
Says I ...
But, if I can't be sorry I might as well be glad !
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#31. Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I And hailed the earth with such a cry As is not heard save from a man Who has been dead, and lives again. About the trees my arms I wound; Like one gone mad I hugged the ground; I raised my quivering arms on high; I laughed and laughed into the sky ...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#32. My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#34. The Fugitive"
Thanks be to God the world is wide,
And I am going far from home,
For I forgot in Camelot
The man I loved in Rome,
And I forgot in Kensington
The man I loved in Kew;
And there must be a place for me
To think no more of you.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#36. Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed;
Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;
Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,
But climb.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#37. I know what my heart is like Since your love died: It is like a hollow ledge Holding a little pool Left there by the tide, A little tepid pool, Drying inward from the edge.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#38. This my personal death? -
That my lungs be failing
To inhale the breath
Others are exhaling?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#39. After all my erstwhile dear, my no longer cherished;
Need we say it was not love, just because it perished?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#40. This book, when I am dead, will be A little faint perfume of me. People who knew me well will say, She really used to think that way.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#42. Learn to love blackness while there is yet time, blackness
Unpatterned, blackness without horizons.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#43. When you are corn and roses and at rest
I shall endure, a dense and sanguine ghost
To haunt the scene where I was happiest
To bend above the thing I loved the most
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#44. Cut if you will with sleep's dull knife, the years from off your life, my friend! the years that death takes off my life, he'll take from off the other end!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#45. To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#48. And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you
all through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,
Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-
And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#50. I have loved badly, loved the great Too soon, withdrawn my words too late; And eaten in an echoing hall Alone and from a chipped plate The words that I withdrew too late.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#53. For men that are afraid to die
Must warm their hands before a lie;
The fire that's built of What is Known
Will chill the marrow in the bone.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#56. How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow ... Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#57. Am I kin to Sorrow,
That so oft
Falls the knocker of my door -
Neither loud nor soft,
But as long accustomed -
Under Sorrow's hand?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#58. The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#62. The room is full of you! - As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick! -
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#64. Not poppy, nor mandrake, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep, Which thou owest yesterday.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#68. A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Grown-up
Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#70. Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more! Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore! And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me, I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly That I might eat again, and met thy sneers With deprecations, and thy blows with tears, ...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#72. Progress-progress is the dirtiest word in the language-who ever told us- And made us believe it-that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always A good idea?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#73. The first rose on my rose-tree
Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
Nothing mattered.
Grief of grief has drained me clean;
Still it seems a pity
No one saw, - it must have been
Very pretty.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#74. The Prisoner
All right,
Go ahead!
What's in a name?
I guess I'll be locked into
As much as I'm locked out of!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#75. Not for the flag Of any land because myself was born there Will I give up my life. But I will love that land where man is free, And that will I defend.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#77. Along my body, waking while I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold to the hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter like a sword
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#86. Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots, Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup,
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#92. A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#93. I am not at all in favor of hard work for its own sake; many people who work very hard indeed produce terrible things, and should most certainly not be encouraged.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#94. L am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#96. I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
The cane, the wrinkled hands, the special chair:
Time, doing this to me, may alter too
My anguish, into something I can bear
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#97. But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#99. I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief.
Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#100. We think-although of course, now, we very seldom Clearly think- That the other side of War is Peace.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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