Quotes from Walter de La Mare

The first of these houses appeared to be occupied. The next two were vacant. Dingy curtains, soot-grey against their snowy window-sills, hung over the next. A litter of paper and refuse-abandoned by the last long gust of wind that must have come whistling round the nearer angle of the house - lay under the broken flight of steps up to a mid-Victorian porch. The small snow clinging to the bricks and to the worn and weathered cement of the wall only added to its gaunt lifelessness. (Bad Company

Is there anybody there? said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door.

When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum. (Out Of The Deep)

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.

Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes, Under this stone one loved too wildly lies; How false she was, no granite could declare; Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.

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

Look thy last on all things lovely Every hour…

Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.

Unless you were preternaturally busy and preoccupied, you simply couldn't live on and on in a haunted house without being occasionally reminded of its ghosts.

They say death's a going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life's a long undressing. We came in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and watch the world fade.

And I suffered the streaming light to fall upon me, as I gazed into my joy and triumph with a kind of severe nonchalance. But though my face under my three-cornered hat can have expressed only calmness and resolution, I knew in my heart that my thoughts were merely a thin wisp of smoke above the crater of a suppressed volcano.

After all, what is man but a hoard of ghosts? Oaks, that were acorns, that were oaks...

What is called realism is usually a record of life at a low pitch and ebb viewed in the sunless light of day.

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

And it always seems to me,' he went on ruminatingly, 'that, after all, we are nothing better than interlopers on the earth, disfiguring and staining wherever we go.

It seemed to my young mind that there was not a day, scarcely an hour, I lived, but that Life was unfolding itself in ever new and ravishing disguises. I had not begun to be in the least tired or afraid of it. Smallest of bubbles I might be, tossing on the great waters, but I reflected the universe.

Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this—this cage? Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars

You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?

It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in memory: you couldn't scale its invisible walls.

Yet part for honesty and part for shame, I had remained silent. I could only comfort myself with remembering that we should soon meet again, and that the future might be kinder. Well, sometimes the future is kinder, but it is never the same thing as the past.

Men whose constant companion was death needed women in a way most men couldn't understand.

sounds as faint as the vanishing remembrance of voices in a dream

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