Walter De La Mare Quotes & Sayings

#1. Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.

Walter De La Mare

#2. All but blind In his chambered hole Gropes for worms The four-clawed Mole.

Walter De La Mare

#3. Who said, 'All Time's delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life's troubled bubble broken'?
That's what I said.

Walter De La Mare

#4. Do diddle di do, Poor Jim Jay Got stuck fast In Yesterday.

Walter De La Mare

#5. A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast Sorrow was there The sweet cheat gone.

Walter De La Mare

#6. God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

Walter De La Mare

#7. What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky.

Walter De La Mare

#8. When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.
("Out Of The Deep")

Walter De La Mare

#9. Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative.
("Out Of The Deep")

Walter De La Mare

#10. A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.

Walter De La Mare

#11. Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do.

Walter De La Mare

#12. And some win peace who spend
The skill of words to sweeten despair
Of finding consolation where
Life has but one dark end.

Walter De La Mare

#13. Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.

Walter De La Mare

#14. Hi! handsome hunting man
Fire your little gun.
Bang! Now the animal
is dead and dumb and done.
Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!

Walter De La Mare

#15. Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business ... Illumined by the imagination, our life, whatever its defeats - is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.

Walter De La Mare

#16. When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.

Walter De La Mare

#17. Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

Walter De La Mare

#18. Very old are the woods; And the buds that break Out of the brier's boughs, When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are
Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.

Walter De La Mare

#19. As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.

Walter De La Mare

#20. We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by, Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie.

Walter De La Mare

#21. What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.

Walter De La Mare

#22. Three jolly huntsmen, In coats of red, Rode their horses Up to bed.

Walter De La Mare

#23. Marvellous happy it was to be
Alone, and yet not solitary.
O out of terror and dark, to come
In sight of home.

Walter De La Mare

#24. Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.

Walter De La Mare

#25. It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.

Walter De La Mare

#26. The only catalogue of this world's goods that really counts is that which we keep in the silence of the mind.

Walter De La Mare

#27. For beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne: The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there; That music, remote, forlorn.

Walter De La Mare

#28. A harvest mouse goes scampering by, With silver claws and silver eye; And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Walter De La Mare

#29. His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, The waters of no-more-pain; His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, Rest, rest, and rest again.

Walter De La Mare

#30. Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water!
("Out Of The Deep")

Walter De La Mare

#31. Is there anybody there? said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door.

Walter De La Mare

#32. I know well that only the rarest kind of best can be good enough for the young.

Walter De La Mare

#33. All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.

Walter De La Mare

#34. Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

Walter De La Mare

#35. When there hasn't been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been.
("Out Of The Deep")

Walter De La Mare

#36. It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

Walter De La Mare

#37. After all, what is man but a hoard of ghosts? Oaks, that were acorns, that were oaks ...

Walter De La Mare

#38. Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer's day.

Walter De La Mare

#39. Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon.

Walter De La Mare

#40. An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.

Walter De La Mare

#41. But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?

Walter De La Mare

#42. It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged.

Walter De La Mare

#43. So, blind to Someone I must be.

Walter De La Mare

#44. There was still an hour or two of daylight - even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy's house was by nature friendly to gloom.
("Out Of The Deep")

Walter De La Mare

#45. Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes,
Under this stone one loved too wildly lies;
How false she was, no granite could declare;
Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.

Walter De La Mare