Quotes from Edward Thomas

Roads go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone.

The moment we recognize an illusion as illusion, it ceases to be illusion and becomes an expression or aspect of reality and experience.

I built myself a house of glass: It took my years to make it: And I was proud. But now, alas! Would God someone would break it. But it looks too magnificent. No neighbour casts a stone From where he dwells, in tenement Or palace of glass, alone.

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, What we below could not see, Winter pass.

The goddesses that dwell Far along invisible Are my favorite gods.

The Past is a strange land, most strange. Wind blows not there, nor does rain fall: If they do, they cannot hurt at all.

To envy a man is to misunderstand him or yourself (pp 111).

But it is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires, the one for going on and on over the earth, the other that would settle for ever, in one place as in a grave and have nothing to do with change. Suppose a man to receive notice of death, it would be hard to decide whether to walk or sail until the end, seeing no man, or none but strangers; or to sit - alone - and by thinking or not thinking to make the change to come as little as is permitted. (pp 161)

The sky would be nothing more to his eye Than he, in any case, is to the sky.

There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it.

Harry, you know at night The larks in Castle Alley Sing from the attic's height As if the electric light Were the true sun above a summer valley: Whistle, don't knock, tonight. I shall come early, Kate: And we in Castle Alley Will sit close out of sight Alone, and ask no light Of lamp or sun above a summer valley: Tonight I can stay late.

Yet I think he was not wholly the loser by being unable to think. The eye untroubled by thought sees things like a mirror newly burnished; at night, for example, the musing can see nothing before him but a mist, but if he stops thinking quickly the roads, the walls, the trees become visible. (pp217)

Making war or rebellion is messy, like eating soup off a knife.

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the woodThis Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, shouldHave gathered them and will do never again.

Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds'The Week's Survey, 18 June 1904

If I should ever by chance grow richI'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,And let them all to my eldest daughter.

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.