Quotes from Walter de La Mare

A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.

Poor Jim JayGot stuck fastIn Yesterday.

Who said "Peacock Pie"?The old king to the sparrow:Who said "Crops are ripe"?Rust to the harrow.

"Tell them that I came, and no one answered,That I kept my word," he said.

Slowly, silently, now the moonWalks the night in her silver shoon.

Nought but vast sorrow was there—The sweet cheat gone.

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveler,Knocking on the moonlit door;And his horse in the silence champed the grassesOf the forest's ferny floor.

It's a very odd thing—As odd as can be—That whatever Miss T. eatsTurns into Miss T.

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...

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

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!

Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.

As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.

What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.

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

Away There is no sorrow Time heals never; No loss, betrayal, Beyond repair. Balm for the soul, then, Though grave shall sever Lover from loved And all they share. See the sweet sun shines The shower is over; Flowers preen their beauty, The day how fair! Brood not too closely On love, on duty; Friends long forgotten May wait you where Life with death Brings all to an issue; None will long mourn for you, Pray for you, miss you, Your place left vacant, You not there.

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

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.

I know well that only the rarest kind of best can be good enough for the young.

Very old are the woods; And the buds that break Out of the brier's boughs, When March winds wake, So old with their beauty are-- Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.

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.

Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

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...