Walter de La Mare
Walter de La Mare
men wind rose
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.
summer hay gone
Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer's day.
motivational silence mind
The only catalogue of this world's goods that really counts is that which we keep in the silence of the mind.
struggle trouble pity
Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.
death dark winning
And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation where Life has but one dark end.
haunting riddle
What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.
morning tired long
Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do.
lifetime hours terror
An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.
school class soul
Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.
adventure imagination kind
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.
lying men chinese
After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...
morning stars autumn
He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.
angel men common
Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.
cat doors long
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.