D.E. Stevenson Quotes

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way I have to go to bed by day.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

To miss the joy is to miss everything.

Sometimes I think it'd be fun to do a completely different job for a while. You've got one life and you do the same job for the whole of it, and you think - was that a good use of a life?

In cases in which the related previous personality had committed suicide, the subject has shown an inclination to contemplate and threaten suicide.

Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life.

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

A great part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.

And every day when I've been good, I get an orange after food.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.

To have all my dear ones together under one roof - that is all I ask of life.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

To make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto.

Make up your mind to be happy.

The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.

I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly.

When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home.

We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.

You can kill the body, but not the spirit.

Protocol, alcohol, and Geritol.

Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted mostly.

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.

If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.

I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.

Nixon is finding out there are no tails on an Eisenhower jacket.

Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.

A lie is an abomination unto the Lord, and a very present help in trouble.

Why is it that when political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is always wheeled into action?

I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.

The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

To be honest...here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude...

If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.

O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.