Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

My heart is warm with the friends I make And better friends I'll not be knowing Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take No matter where it's going.

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

I turn away reluctant from your light,And stand irresolute, a mind undone,A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sightFrom having looked too long upon the sun.Then is my daily life a narrow roomIn which a little while, uncertainly,Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,Among familiar things grown strange to meMaking my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,Till I become accustomed to the dark.

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

Degraded bird, I give you back your eyes forever, ascend now whither you are tossed;Forsake this wrist, forsake this rhyme;Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost,But climb.

I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.

Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSuch things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being giveIn Beauty's name, while she may live,Beauty that may not die as longAs there are flowers and you and song.

Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sunThat 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 charityThat lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.That this could be!That I should live to seeMost vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,So fitted out with purple robe and crownTo stand among his betters! Face to faceWith outraged me in this once holy place,Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and huntedTruth 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 dreamYou have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.