Top 100 Millay Quotes
#1. If Edna St. Vincent Millay was right and childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies, then my childhood ended when I was fifteen.
Katja Millay
#2. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That's our official slogan.
Ray Bradbury
#3. This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.
Natalie Goldberg
#4. Even after several hospitalizations for alcohol and drug-related nervous breakdowns, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay defined sobriety as restricting her daily intake of liquor to a liter and a half of wine.
Judith Thurman
#5. Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.
Kurt Vonnegut
#6. 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
#7. We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not.
Dorothy Parker
#8. My verses, I cannot say poems ... I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.
Dorothy Parker
#9. including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Kate Bolick
#11. 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
#12. But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair, - and the long year remembers you.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#15. 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
#17. 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
#18. He holds up a finger to her to convey that he'll just be a minute. If I were him, I'd choose a different finger.
Katja Millay
#19. People like Josh Bennett and I don't get perfect. Most of the time, we don't even get remotely tolerable. And that's why it scares me. Because, even if there was such a thing to begin with, perfect never lasts.
Katja Millay
#20. It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#21. It's like having a ghost in my garage. I feel like I'm being haunted. With all the dead people I've got in my corner, you'd think one of them would be the one hanging around.
Katja Millay
#22. Heart, have no pity on this house of bone:
Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#23. My phone is on my bed, whispering in my ear like a bottle of scotch to a recovering alcoholic, while the rain continues cackling at me through my window
Katja Millay
#25. Girls always want to change the rules in the middle of the game.
Katja Millay
#26. Sarah. I smiled. I couldn't help but appreciate the absolute perfection of the name; bland, common, and wholly unoriginal. Best of all, it means princess.
Katja Millay
#27. 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
#28. I say Sunshine and then she shatters.
All the pieces of all the girls go flying and I'm holding the one who's left.
Katja Millay
#30. I didn't belong in this world anymore. It's not that I wanted to be dead, I just felt like I should be.
Katja Millay
#31. He's the be all and end all of my friends right now.
Katja Millay
#32. Good Morning, Sunshine! Josh F**king Bennett. By now, I'm pretty sure that if I were to find his birth certificate that is exactly what it would say.
Katja Millay
#33. Oh, you mean I'm a homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what's that got to do with my headache?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#34. Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#36. Wonderful. Last night's dinner, the charred remains of my dignity, and apparently, now, my undergarments, too. What else did I leave on Josh Bennett's bathroom floor?
Katja Millay
#38. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.
Katja Millay
#39. I doubt taking in a sullen, bitter, teenage girl with more issues than National Geographic is at the center of the vision board for a single woman in her early thirties.
Katja Millay
#40. 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
#41. It's been five weeks since she walked out of my door. I started counting the second the door closed. I wonder when I'll stop.
Katja Millay
#42. Plus, once he did the requisite double-take and recognized me, he'd probably beat the crap out of any guy who looked at me in all my Snow White meets Frederick's of Hollywood glory.
Katja Millay
#43. If self-adoration were cologne, he would be the boy you couldn't stand next to without choking.
Katja Millay
#44. We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#45. So, you actually cooked tonight? He regards me skeptically. I snort. Because snorting is attractive.
Katja Millay
#46. What is she to you?" she whispers. The real question and I know the answer even if I don't know how to say it. Drew's muffled voice rises up from the floor before I can respond. "Family," he says. And he's right.
Katja Millay
#47. I think I'll stay in pieces. I can shift them, rearrange, depending on the day, depending on what I need to be. I can change on a whim and be so many different girls and none of them has to be me.
Katja Millay
#48. Please don't think me negligent or rude. I am both, in effect, of course, but please don't think me either.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#49. Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#50. I didn't stop talking immediately. I talked right up until the day I remembered everything that happened, over a year later. That was the day I went silent. It wasn't a ploy or a tactic. It wasn't psychosomatic. It was a choice. And I made it.
Katja Millay
#51. My jealousy is a living thing. Shifting, changing, growing. Like my rage and my mother's regret.
Katja Millay
#52. I believe in God, Sunshine. I've always believed that God exists," he says. And what he says next isn't self-pity or angst or melodrama. It's truth. "I just know that he hates me." Maybe
Katja Millay
#56. And there are so many missing that the ones that are left don't fit together anymore.
Katja Millay
#57. It seems like the more my body healed, the more fractured my mind became, and there aren't enough wires and screws to fix he breaks in it.
Katja Millay
#58. Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note
In me a beauty that was never mine,
How first you knew me in a book I wrote,
How first you loved me for a written line ...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#61. most. If I could be alone, I would. Gratefully. I'd rather be alone than have to pretend I'm okay. But they won't give me that option. So I'll settle for being with someone who at least doesn't love me as much. I'm thankful for Margot. Not that I tell her this. Not that I tell her anything. I don't.
Katja Millay
#62. if I could take a picture of the expression that passes between them, I would, and then I'd shove it in both their faces so they could never deny it again.
Katja Millay
#63. I decline the coffee. I don't drink it, because no matter how much sugar I put into it, it still tastes like ass-water to me. Maybe it's because my taste buds are so desensitized to sweet that anything not comprised of at least ninety percent sugar tastes wrong
Katja Millay
#64. I would like to believe in the dream of second chances. For both of us.
Katja Millay
#65. 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
#66. There really isn't a way to explain how a person you've seen every day of your life just isn't anymore. Someone just hit delete and she's gone.
Katja Millay
#67. It's not that I wanted to be dead, I just felt like I should be. Which is why it's hard when everyone expects you to be grateful simply because you're not.
Katja Millay
#71. I feel like grabbing my crotch and checking to see if my balls are still there because I think they may be in her pocket and I need to get them back.
Katja Millay
#73. The silent thing is definitely a barrier in terms of making friends
Katja Millay
#74. I never realized that grief and self-pity weren't the same thing. I thought grieving was what I was doing all this time I had been feeling sorry for myself, but it wasn't. So for the first time in nearly three years, I let myself grieve.
Katja Millay
#76. And as much as I'm telling her to stay here, I still want her to choose to come with me. To say fuck sanity and healing and closure. To say that I am the only thing she needs to be well and whole and alive. But we both know that's not true.
Katja Millay
#77. Earth does not understand her child,
Who from the loud gregarious town
Returns, depleted and defiled,
To the still woods, to fling him down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#78. Relaxing me from head to feet
Love masters me, the bitter sweet
O'er thy limbs breathing;
Yea, Eros now, the god born blind
Sweeps my soul like the mountain wind
Through the oaks seething.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#79. Let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#83. Ah, I could lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#84. Into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#85. What about Josh?" I think there's more to that question than she's letting on but she's testing the waters. Salvation, I write. She looks at the word and nods. And for a minute she looks as sad as I feel.
"That fits, I think.
Katja Millay
#86. Thats the irony of Josh and me, and it shames me every time I think about it. He has no family. No one to love him. I'm surrounded by love and I dont want any of it. I piss all over what he woud thank God for. And if I needed more proof that I have no soul, then there it is.
Katja Millay
#87. If eavesdropping on someone else's nightmares is supposed to make me feel better, I'd rather stay feeling like shit. I don't think telling them about my horror story would do me any good. And besides, I'm not even supposed to have a story to tell. - Nastya Kashnikov
Katja Millay
#88. In memory of my father, because he said so
Katja Millay
#90. Seeing Josh is my homecoming. I didn't tell him I was coming back. He doesn't say anything when he sees me, and neither do I, because the fact that I'm here is an answer. We just look at each other and speak in the silence like we always have and no one interrupts the conversation.
Katja Millay
#92. It's not the sound itself that bothers me; it's just the fact that it's loud. The loud sounds make it impossible to hear the soft sounds and the soft sounds are the ones you have to be afraid of.
Katja Millay
#93. 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
#95. No one ever asks. Like they think they're doing me a favor. That if they don't bring it up, I won't have to think about it. Just because I don't talk about it doesn't mean i forget. I don't talk about it because no one ever asks.
Katja Millay
#96. Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart. I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain, And I lie disheveled in the grass apart, A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#97. Under my head till morning; but the rain, Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh, Upon the glass and listen for reply ...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#98. Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom, golden in the green grass,
This life can be.
Common as a dandelion-blossom, beautiful in the clean grass, not beautiful
Because common, beautiful because beautiful,
Noble because common, because free.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#99. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
