Quotes from Stevie Smith

I am a forward-looking girl and don't stay where I am. "Left right, Be bright," as I said in my poem. That's on days when I am one big bounce, and have to go careful then not to be a nuisance. But later I get back to my own philosophical outlook that keeps us all kissable.

And soon all our minds will be flat as a pancake, With no room for genius exaltation or heartache. And our children and theirs will preen, smirk and chatter, With not even the sense to ask what is the matter.

We carry our own wilderness with us.

But oh how sure I am that it is so much better to have love with all its pains and terrors and fanaticism than to live untouched the life of the vegetable. But how it tears one, and how unruhig it is.

The grass is green The tulip is red A ginger cat walks over The pink almond petals on the flower bed. Enough has been said to show It is life we are taking about. - Oh grateful colours; bright looks!

Death's not a separation or alternation or parting it's just a one-handled door" - from "Mrs Simpkins

Children who paddle where the ocean bed shelves steeply Must take great care they do not, Paddle too deeply.' Thus spake the awful aging couple Whose heart the years had turned to rubble. But the little children, to save any bother, Let it in at one ear and out at the other.

Ceux qui luttent ce sont ceux qui vivent.. And down here they luttent a very great deal indeed.. But if life be the desideratum,. why grieve,. ils vivent..

My life is vile I hate it so I'll wait awhile And then I'll go. Why wait at all? Hope springs alive, Good may befall I yet may thrive. It is because I can't make up my mind If God is good, impotent or unkind. - The Reason

So what are they about? Oh people, said the young man. People? said the countess-ah, they are very difficult.

Oh, I say, if we were meant to come back to God, why were we sent out, why were we sent away? I wish for innocence more than anything, but I am conscious only of corruption.

he said that it was better to cry for love than for fear, but best of all for repentance.

And it is this merry heart, he goes on to explain, and how it must be cantered in God, for this merry heart has a holy lightness that has nothing to do with outside excitements, no, it is centred in God and happy, because it knows that not all of itself can be good, or anything, but only in and through God.

Hope and desire, All unfulfilled. Have more than rope And hangman killed.

One of the greatest qualities which have made the English a great people is their eminently sane, reasonable, fairminded inability to conceive that any viewpoint save their own can possibly have the slightest merit.

Now when a people has dictators, that is a symptom that they are running mad. They should be watched. I think they should be watched very closely. And later they should be prevented. Now think it is not a nation but an individual, now see, this is like he had a disease.

The English woman is so refined She has no bosom and no behind.

The sea was angry that day my friend, like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli.

A man may forgive many wrongs, but he cannot easily forgive anyone who makes it plain that his conversation is tedious.

A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make.

I like food, I like stripping vegetables of their skins, I like to have a slim young parsnip under my knife.