Midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium.
TS Eliot
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
Dylan Thomas
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
W. H. Auden
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake 1757-1827
'Auguries of Innocence' (c.1803) l. 1
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
W. B. Yeats
Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet
when it stops.
Goethe (1749-1832)
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
W. B. Yeats
I said "a line will take us hours maybe,
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."
In the Seven Woods (1903) "Adam's Curse"
Sir J. M. Barrie 1860-1937
When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand
pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
Peter Pan
I have been a stranger in a strange land.
Exodus ch. 2, v. 22. See Exodus ch. 18, v. 3
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go
for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.
Movable Feast (1964) epigraph - Hemingway
Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and
sublime, leave behind to conquer time.