Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.

Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

A infância não vai do nascimento até certa idade,e a certa altura a criança está crescida,deixando de lado as coisas de criança.A infância é o reino onde ninguém morre.

"PIERROT: Of course not. There never was. "Moon's" just a word to swear by. "Mutton!" — now there's a thing you can lay the hands on, And set the tooth in! Listen, Columbine: I always lied about the moon and you. Food is my only lust. COLUMBINE: Well, eat it, then, For Heaven's sake, and stop your silly noise! I haven't heard the clock tick for an hour."

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. (in a letter written while she was in college)

I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.

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.

But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.

Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sun
That will not rise again.
Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,
Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charity
That lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.

That this could be!
That I should live to see
Most vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,
So fitted out with purple robe and crown
To stand among his betters! Face to face
With outraged me in this once holy place,
Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and hunted
Truth was harboured out of danger,
He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger!

I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:
The hills may shift, the waters may decline,
Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,
But never your love from me, your hand from mine.

Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.
Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!
You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dream
You have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.

14. Indifference

I SAID, — for Love was laggard, O, Love was slow to come, — “I’ll hear his step and know his step when I am warm in bed;
But I’ll never leave my pillow, though there be some
As would let him in — and take him in with tears!” I said.
I lay, — for Love was laggard, O, he came not until dawn, — 5
I lay and listened for his step and could not get to sleep;
And he found me at my window with my big cloak on,
All sorry with the tears some folks might weep!

Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.

Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.

If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.

Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,
I shall have only good to say of you.

There is no God.
But it does not matter.
Man is enough.

No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me in this windy place.

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you
all through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,
Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-
And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?