"These things shall be! A loftier race Than e'er the world hath known, shall rise With flame of freedom in their souls, And light of science in their eyes."

"She smiled, and the shadows departed; She shone, and the snows were rain; And he who was frozen-hearted Bloomed up into love again."

"Shades are we; and of shades we weave A trifling pleasant make-believe; Then pass into the shadowy night, Where formless shades blindfold the light."

"Gods fade; but God abides and in man’s heart Speaks with the clear unconquerable cry Of energies and hopes that can not die."

"No seed shall perish which the soul hath sown."

"Look when the clouds are blowing And all the winds are free: In fury of their going They fall upon the sea. But though the blast is frantic, And though the tempest raves, The deep immense Atlantic Is still beneath the waves."

"The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all. As attributed without citation in At Home by Bill Bryson, Chapter V, "The Scullery and the Larder" p. 111"

"Edna St. Vincent Millay was outspoken and feisty."

"When I was a freshman at Brandeis, an instructor told us that we should not like Edna St. Vincent Millay. He didn’t say it in so many words, but the message was that we shouldn’t like her because she slept around. No women got into the modernist boys’ club except Marianne Moore, who was respected because she was respectable. Sexually respectable. This sounds oversimplified, but it isn’t. All the other women poets had sex lives — kinky sex lives."

"T. S. Eliot, Millay, Helene Margaret, I read and connected with because they made me feel what they were feeling, or wanted to feel."

"Wylie and Millay were standard in high school-women whom I really loved."

"When I was in high school, I had never read Black poetry. The one poet of color whom I had read, and loved, was Pablo Neruda. I have to say that Neruda and Millay were the two poets I loved. All the others didn't make much sense. Except Eliot. He really got to me."

"When people talk about American literature, they really mean Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe and when they do include women it's Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To decide to take that on and say, 'I will speak and will be heard'-that takes a lot of guts."

"… one damn thing after another … one damn thing over and over."

"Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is."

"Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone."

"Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more."

"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere."

"My heart is warm with friends I make, And better friends I'll not be knowing, Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, No matter where it's going."

"After all, my earstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it was not love, Now that love is perished?"

"But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithless when I most am true."

"One thing there's no getting by— I've been a wicked girl." said I; "But if I can't be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!"

"Many a bard's untimely death Lends unto his verses breath; Here's a song was never sung: Growing old is dying young."

"Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand; Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!"

"My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light."

"It's little I know what's in my heart, What's in my mind it's little I know, But there's that in me must up and start, And it's little I care where my feet go."

"The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky, — No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat — the sky Will cave in on him by and by."

"But, sure, the sky is big, I said; Miles and miles above my head; So here upon my back I'll lie And look my fill into the sky. And so I looked, and, after all, The sky was not so very tall. The sky, I said, must somewhere stop, And — sure enough! — I see the top! The sky, I thought, is not so grand; I 'most could touch it with my hand! And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky."

"Ah! sovereign Love, forgive this weaker rhyme! The men of old who sang were great at heart, Yet have we too known woe, and worn thy rose."

"Canst thou not wait for Love one flying hour O heart of little faith?"

"The wizard silence of the hours of dew."

"A sheep in sheep's clothing."

"On what strange stuff Ambition feeds."

"Better build school-rooms for "the boy," Than cells and gibbets for "the man.""

"How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start When Memory plays an old tune on the heart."

"I love it, I love it; and who shall dare To chide me for loving that old arm-chair?"

"His thoughts, delivered to me From the white coverlet and pillow, I see now, were inheritances— Delicate riders of the storm."

"A question: when is a bed not a bed? When it is angled lie-flat. My back hurts, my legs ache and my clothes are all rumpled - and all because the airline, which claimed to have a bed, actually offered up a torture machine which I prefer to call a slide."

"I am not angry. I am just disappointed that, once again, a hotel has tried to convince me it will move heaven and earth to ensure I am comfortable when, in reality, it won’t even pass me the coffee pot!"

"I am tired of hotels promising to go the extra mile only to have them refuse to go round the corner!"

"Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed."

"We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise."

"I am beginning to have a healthy dread of possessions, be it of a country, a house, a being or even an idea. If we are bothered by possessions we cannot really live either from without or from within; we are the possession of our possessions. All wars and most loves come from the possessive instinct. Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men: that you may belong to everything and everything be yours inclusive of yourself. Could we, and we can, have the vital necessities for all, we should do away with this cry of class and begin to differentiate between individuals. Individual superiority can alone feed the soul and give back through some materialisation of itself this individualised wealth of being."

"The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight."

"If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it."

"Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth."

"I admired Crane very much; in fact, I still do...I have always been interested in that dichotomy and in that great paradox in our history. The clash between the pastoral and the technological, and Crane wrote about that, as did Whitman, as did Leo Marx, as have a lot of people. And certainly that has been one of the themes in my writing; that appeals to me a great deal; and Crane did a very good job with it in his poems, especially in the conception of "The Bridge" itself as a narrative. I like that very much. So he was a very important figure to me at the time and, though he is not as important to me now, he remains important. I think he was an important writer, and I felt about him at one time as I feel about Emily Dickinson now."

"I've always loved Hart Crane; but I love him in fractions, delighting in half a dozen of those rhapsodic poems long on style and short on sense but finding the rest mystifying as a Masonic ritual. In some of his best poems, I merely admire lines, and in some of those lines I merely admire phrases."

"Goodbye, everybody."