Edgar Lee Masters Quotes

And when you are poor and have to carry
The Christian creed and wife and children
All on your back, it is too much!
That's why I made the Elixir of Youth,
Which landed me in the jail at Peoria
Branded a swindler and a crook
By the upright Federal Judge!

In the last spring I ever knew,
In those last days,
I sat in the forsaken orchard
Where beyond fields of greenery shimmered
The hills at Miller's Ford;
Just to muse on the apple tree
With its ruined trunk and blasted branches,
And shoots of green whose delicate blossoms
Were sprinkled over the skeleton tangle,
Never to grow in fruit.
And there was I with my spirit girded
By the flesh half dead, the senses numb,
Yet thinking of youth and the earth in youth,-
Such phantom blossoms palely shining
Over the lifeless boughs of Time.
O earth that leaves us ere heaven takes us!
Had I been only a tree to shiver
With dreams of spring and a leafy youth,
Then I had fallen in the cyclone
Which swept me out of the soul's suspense
Where it's neither earth nor heaven.

And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle — And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

Suppose a boy steals an apple
From the tray at the grocery store,
And they all begin to call him a thief,
The editor, minister, judge, and all the people –
«A thief», «a thief», «a thief», wherever he goes.
And he can't get work, and he can't get bread
Without stealing it, why the boy will steal.
It's the way people regard the theft of an apple
That makes the boy what he is.

Whenever the Presbyterian bell
Was rung by itself, I knew it as the Presbyterian bell.
But when its sound was mingled
With the sound of the Methodist, the Christian,
The Baptist and the Congregational,
I could no longer distinguish it.
Nor any one from the others, or either of them.

The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.

But instead I mounted a little in life,
And I owe it all to a book I read.
But why did I go to Mason City,
Where I chanced to see the book in a window,
With its garish cover luring my eye?
And why did my soul respond to the book,
As I read it over and over?

"Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?"

But a man can never avenge himself on the monstrous ogre Life.

Act well your part,
there all the honor lies.

The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?

To this generation I would say:
Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.

Back of every soldier is a woman.

To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire — It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

Blind as I was, I tried to get out
As the carriage fell in the ditch,
And was caught in the wheels and killed.