Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes
All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I?
What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
But I, in the chilling twilight stand and wait At the portcullis, at thy castle gate, Longing to see the charmed door of dreams Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!
Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.
I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.
Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.
The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is.
When friends are at your hearthside met, Sweet courtesy has done its most If you have made each guest forget That he himself is not the host.
Hebe's here, May is here! The air is fresh and sunny; And the miser-bees are busy Hoarding golden honey.
Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.
Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant
What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.
We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed The white of their leaves, the amber grain Shrunk in the wind,-and the lightning now Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.
Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.
How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
No bird has ever uttered note That was not in some first bird's throat; Since Eden's freshness and man's fall No rose has been original.
October turned my maple's leaves to gold; The most are gone now; here and there one lingers: Soon these will slip from the twigs' weak hold, Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.
A glance, a word -- and joy or pain befalls.... How slight the links are in the chain that binds us to our destiny!
The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a false sorrow.
Up from the dark the moon begins to creep; and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly.
The young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever anybody praises her she breaks into colors.
At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as in the Middle Ages.
Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.
The ability to have our own way, and at the same time convince others they are having their own way, is a rare thing among men. Among women it is as common as eyebrows.
The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know.
So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.
My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.
This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death.
Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.
Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven That from the East glad message brings. Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapped to the eyes in his black wings.
That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.
