Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes
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.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - it gives a lovely light!
Beautiful as a dandelion-blossom golden in the green grass, this life can be.
I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.
They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now
I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Parrots, tortoises and redwoods live a longer life than men do; Men a longer life than dogs do; Dogs a longer life than love does.
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.
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?
Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, And left the flushed print in a poppy there. I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one.
It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.
Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink.
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me in this windy place.
The fabric of my faithful love No power shall dim or ravel Whilst I stay here - but oh, my dear, If I should ever travel!
This book, when I am dead, will be A little faint perfume of me. People who knew me well will say, She really used to think that way.
How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow . . . Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
Cruel of heart, lay down my song. Your reading eyes have done me wrong. Not for you was the pen bitten, And the mind wrung, and the song written.
I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind.
To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.
We think-although of course, now, we very seldom Clearly think- That the other side of War is Peace.
I have loved badly, loved the great Too soon, withdrawn my words too late; And eaten in an echoing hall Alone and from a chipped plate The words that I withdrew too late.
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew Who would have loved you in a day or two.
pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.
You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.
I drank at every vine, the last was like the first. I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst.
let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air.
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note In me a beauty that was never mine, How first you knew me in a book I wrote, How first you loved me for a written line.
I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
