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Walter de la Mare QUOTES

Walter de la Mare QUOTES

1 " After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until... "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

2 " It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

3 " Who said, 'All Time's delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life's troubled bubble broken'? ---
That's what I said. "

― Walter de la Mare , Peacock Pie

4 " Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

5 " That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

6 " Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

7 " We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean... "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

8 " Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

9 " God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

10 " A poor old Widow in her weeds
Sowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;
Not too shallow, and not too deep,
And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip.
Up shone May, like gold, and soon
Green as an arbour grew leafy June.
And now all summer she sits and sews
Where willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,
Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,
Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;
Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;
Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;
Like Oberon's meadows her garden is
Drowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.
Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,
And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;
And all she has is all she needs --
A poor Old Widow in her weeds. "

― Walter de la Mare , Peacock Pie

11 " It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

12 " Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

13 " I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? - have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

14 " His brow is seamed with line and scar;
His cheek is red and dark as wine;
The fires as of a Northern star
Beneath his cap of sable shine.

His right hand, bared of leathern glove,
Hangs open like an iron gin,
You stoop to see his pulses move,
To hear the blood sweep out and in.

He looks some king, so solitary
In earnest thought he seems to stand,
As if across a lonely sea
He gazed impatient of the land.

Out of the noisy centuries
The foolish and the fearful fade;
Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes,
Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed. "

― Walter de la Mare

15 " Oh, pity the poor glutton
Whose troubles all begin
In struggling on and on to turn
What's out into what's in. "

― Walter de la Mare

16 " The time's gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy's all very well but after all it's justice that clinches the bargain. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

17 " Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford. "

― Walter de la Mare

18 " Hi! handsome hunting man
Fire your little gun.
Bang! Now the animal
is dead and dumb and done.
Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun! "

― Walter de la Mare , Rhymes and Verses: Collected Poems for Young People

19 " In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return

20 " Lawford had soundlessly stolen a pace or two nearer, and by stopping forward he could, each in turn, scrutinize the little intent company sitting over his story around the lamp at the further end of the table; squatting like little children with their twigs and pins, fishing for wonders on the brink of the unknown. "

― Walter de la Mare , The Return