Quotes from Thomas Bailey Aldrich

...And great cloud-continents of sunset-seas.

With the tears a Land hath shed Their graves should ever be green.

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.

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.

O Liberty...! is it well To leave the gates unguarded?

Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death— We die whene'er we think of it!

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest of human creature that walks.

What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

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.

To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent - that is to triumph over old age.

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

We weep when we are born, not when we die!

And who are you?" cried one agape, Shuddering in the gloaming light. "I know not" said the second Shape, "I only died last night.

We shall get on famously...and be capital friends forever.

It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.

Then the ship gave sudden lurches that made it a matter of uncertainty whether one was going to put his fork in his mouth or into his eye.

Whenever a new scholar came to out school, I used to confront him at recess with the following words: 'My name's Tom Bailey: what's your name?' If the name struck me favorably, I shook hands with the new pupil cordially; but if it didn't I would turn on my heel, for I was particular in this point. Such names as Higgins, Wiggins, and Spriggins were deadly afronts to my ear; while Lapgdon, Wallace, Blake, and the like, were passing words to my confidence and esteem.

We visit...a neighboring grave-yard. I am by this time in a condition of mind to become a willing inmate of the place.

I hope he and she that was Miss Wang Wang are very happy together, sitting cross-legged over dimenitive cups of tea in a sky-blue tower hung with bells.

What a Babel of voices it was, everybody directing everybody else, and everybody doing everything wrong!

Fell over the prostrate steersman, and there we all lay in a heep, two or three of us quite picturesque with the nosebleed.

Conway would give me no rest until I fought him. I felt it was ordained ages before our birth that we should meet on this planet and fight.

Not to prolong a mystery that must already oppress the reader, Mr. Bilkins's cook had, after the manner of her kind, stolen out of the premises before the family were up, and got herself married—surreptitiously and artfully married, as if matrimony were an indictable offence.