Stevie Smith Quotes

#1. It is an amiable part of human nature, that we should love our animals; it is even better to love them to the point of folly, than not to love them at all.

Stevie Smith

#2. The flower and fruit of love are mine The ant, the fieldmouse and the mole

Stevie Smith

#3. Prate not to me of suicide, Faint heart in battle, not for pride I say Endure, but that such end denied Makes welcomer yet the death that's to be died.

Stevie Smith

#4. I'll have your heart, if not by gift my knife Shall carve it out. I'll have your heart, your life.

Stevie Smith

#5. One never knows really how things are with other people, they just do always seem more spirited than oneself somehow.

Stevie Smith

#6. I'm alive today, therefore I'm just as much a part of our time as everybody else. The times will just have to enlarge themselves to make room for me, won't they, and for everybody else.

Stevie Smith

#7. I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.

Stevie Smith

#8. I may be smelly and I may be old, Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools, But where my fish float by I bless their swimming, And I like the people to bathe in me especially women.

Stevie Smith

#9. There can be no good art that is international. Art to be vigorous and gesund must use the material at hand.

Stevie Smith

#10. The Reason"

My life is vile
I hate it so
I'll wait awhile
And then I'll go.

Why wait at all?
Hope springs alive,
Good may befall
I yet may thrive.

It is because I can't make up my mind
If God is good, impotent or unkind.

Stevie Smith

#11. Why does my muse only speak when she is uhnhappy? She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy.

Stevie Smith

#12. And soon all our minds will be flat as a pancake,
With no room for genius exaltation or heartache.
And our children and theirs will preen, smirk and chatter,
With not even the sense to ask what is the matter.

Stevie Smith

#13. Unpopular, lonely and loving, Elinor need not trouble, For if she were not so loving, She would not be so miserable.

Stevie Smith

#14. Fourteen-year-old, why must you giggle and dote,
Fourteen-year-old, why are you such a goat?
I'm fourteen years old, that is the reason,
I giggle and dote in season.

Stevie Smith

#15. As Nature is always careless and indifferent
Who sees, who steps, means nothing and this is pretty.

Stevie Smith

#16. But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever ...

Stevie Smith

#17. Some are born for peace and joy
Some are born for sorrow
But only for a day as we
Shall not be here tomorrow

Stevie Smith

#18. This Englishwoman is so refined, She has no bosom and no behind.

Stevie Smith

#19. Nothing is more wistful than the scent of lilac, nor more robust than its woody stalk, for we must remember that it is a tree as well as a flower, we must try not to forget this ...

Stevie Smith

#20. If there wasn't death, I think you couldn't go on.

Stevie Smith

#21. The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.

Stevie Smith

#22. Youth is an arithmetical statement of passing interest, each hour eats it up.

Stevie Smith

#23. I made Man with too many faults. Yet I love him. And if he wishes, I have a home above for him.

Stevie Smith

#24. The religion of Christianity Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty Reject this Sweetness, for she wears A smoky dress out of hell fires.

Stevie Smith

#25. Dear little Bog-Face,
Why are you so cold?
And why do you lie with your eyes shut?
You are not very old.
I am a Child of this World
And a Child of Grace,
And Mother, I shall be glad when it is over,
I am Bog-Face.

Stevie Smith

#26. Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above
As I fear the friends below.

Stevie Smith

#27. I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen

Stevie Smith

#28. A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make ...

Stevie Smith

#29. Who is this that comes in grandeur, coming from the blazing East? This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ.

Stevie Smith

#30. I love people, but I love the thought and memory of them just as much.

Stevie Smith

#31. Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.

Stevie Smith

#32. A man may forgive many wrongs, but he cannot easily forgive anyone who makes it plain that his conversation is tedious.

Stevie Smith

#33. All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Stevie Smith

#34. All tamed animals are nervous, we have given them reason to be, not only by cruelty but by our love too, that presses upon them. They have not been able to be entirely indifferent to this and untouched by it.

Stevie Smith

#35. Oh Lion in a peculiar guise,
Sharp Roman road to Paradise,
Come eat me up, I'll pay thy toll
With all my flesh, and keep my soul.

Stevie Smith

#36. Children who paddle where the ocean bed shelves steeply
Must take great care they do not, Paddle too deeply.'
Thus spake the awful aging couple
Whose heart the years had turned to rubble.
But the little children, to save any brother,
Let it in at one ear and out at the other.

Stevie Smith

#37. Cry pretty, pretty, pretty and you'll be able
Very soon not even to cry pretty
And so be delivered entirely from humanity
This is prettiest of all, it is very pretty.

Stevie Smith

#38. So I fancy my Muse says, when I wish to die, Oh no, Oh no, we are not yet friends enough, And Virtue also says: We are not yet friends enough.

Stevie Smith

#39. Life may be treacherous, but you can always depend on death.

Stevie Smith

#40. I am a forward-looking girl and don't stay where I am. "Left right, Be bright," as I said in my poem. That's on days when I am one big bounce, and have to go careful then not to be a nuisance. But later I get back to my own philosophical outlook that keeps us all kissable.

Stevie Smith

#41. If I lie down on my bed I must be here,
But if I lie down in my grave I may be elsewhere.

Stevie Smith

#42. Ceux qui luttent ce sont ceux qui vivent..
And down here they luttent a very great deal indeed..
But if life be the desideratum,. why grieve,. ils vivent..

Stevie Smith

#43. The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out.

Stevie Smith

#44. Death's not a separation or alteration or parting; it's just a one-handled door.

Stevie Smith

#45. Hope and desire,
All unfulfilled,
Have more than rope
And hangman killed.

Stevie Smith

#46. My Muse sits forlorn
She wishes she had not been born
She sits in the cold
No word she says is ever told.

Stevie Smith

#47. Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

Stevie Smith

#48. Love is not love that wounded bleeds And bleeding sullies slow. Come death within my hands and I Unto my love will go.

Stevie Smith

#49. People who are always praising the past And especially the time of faith as best Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.

Stevie Smith

#50. You must have some money if you are going to live simply. It need not be much, but you must have some.

Stevie Smith

#51. My heart was full of softening showers,
I used to swing like this for hours,
I did not care for war or death,
I was glad to draw my breath.

Stevie Smith

#52. Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning. I was much further out than you thought, and not waving but drowning. I was much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith

#53. Now when a people has dictators, that is a symptom that they are running mad. They should be watched. I think they should be watched very closely. And later they should be prevented. Now think it is not a nation but an individual, now see, this is like he had a disease.

Stevie Smith