Housman Poetry Quotes

#1. Maybe I was being too picky. Maybe I didn't want to be close to anyone. Maybe I'd just be the type who couldn't feel love all the way or something. I couldn't tell what was wrong, but what was wrong was that it just wasn't right.

Deb Caletti

#2. With Rue My Heart Is Laden
With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

A.E. Housman

#3. I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what's already been set in motion.

Michael Cunningham

#4. I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

Alfred Edward Housman

#5. Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on."
The older woman poured herself a glass of sangria. "Screw that," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Screw that. Wash your mouth out. Who taught you that half-assed existential drivel?

Armistead Maupin

#6. Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

A.E. Housman

#7. Note to Self - Thoughts design my energy! My thoughts WILL design the energy
that moves me!

Alan Rufus

#8. Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.

A.E. Housman

#9. To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

A.E. Housman

#10. I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health.

A.E. Housman

#11. My wife had taken off on a plane. Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I, of course, like any other person, felt potentially devastated, panicky a little bit.

Ted Olson

#12. It nods and curtseys and recovers
When the wind blows above,
The nettle on the graves of lovers
That hanged themselves for love.
The nettle nods, the wind blows over,
The man, he does not move,
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love.

A.E. Housman

#13. The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people.

Phil Gramm

#14. A friend is someone with whom you dare to be yourself.

Frank Crane

#15. He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.

Michel De Montaigne

#16. Watching you at work, I was reminded of the young lady of Natchez, whose clothes were all tatters and patches. In alluding to which, she would say, Well, Ah itch, and wherever ah itches, Ah scratches.

P.G. Wodehouse

#17. I listened wide-eyed, stupid. Glowing by her voice in the dim light. If chocolate was a sound, it would've been Constantine's voice singing. If singing was a color, it would've been the color of that chocolate.

Kathryn Stockett

#18. See, this is the way I see it. Not all anger is the same. Because there are different kids of anger. And you know what else - sometimes, anger is a virtue. As long as you're not making someone bleed.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#19. The time of persecution and opposition is a time of cleansing

Sunday Adelaja

#20. Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A.E. Housman

#21. Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

A.E. Housman

#22. Good religious poetry ... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.

A.E. Housman

#23. Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.

A.E. Housman

#24. I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

A.E. Housman