"Who said "Peacock Pie"? The old king to the sparrow: Who said "Crops are ripe"? Rust to the harrow. Who said, "Ay, mum's the word"? Sexton to willow. Who said, "Green dusk for dream?" Moss for a pillow. Who said, "All Time’s delight Hath she for narrow bed; Life’s troubled bubble broken"?— That’s what I said."

""Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said."

"Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Aye, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone."

"De la Mare’s poetry represents some of the finest, beautifully crafted, classical verse of the twentieth century. It is truly tragic that his poems remain largely neglected, forgotten as the world passed them by."

"What lovely things Thy hand hath made."

"“Bunches of grapes,” says Timothy; “Pomegranates pink,” says Elaine; “A junket of cream and a cranberry tart For me,” says Jane."

"So, blind to Someone I must be."

"“A bumpity ride in a wagon of hay”"

"Old Rover in his moss-greened house Mumbles a bone, and barks at a mouse."

"Dobbin at manger pulls his hay: Gone is another summer’s day."

"Poor tired Tim! It’s sad for him He lags the long bright morning through, Ever so tired of nothing to do."

"All but blind In his chambered hole Gropes for worms The four-clawed Mole."

"Softly along the road of evening, In a twilight dim with rose, Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew Old Nod, the shepherd, goes."

"His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, The waters of no-more-pain; His ram’s bell rings ‘neath an arch of stars, “Rest, rest, and rest again.”"

"Some one came knocking At my wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I’m sure—sure—sure."

"We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by, Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie."

"Wonderful lovely there she sat, Singing the night away, All in the solitudinous sea Of that there lonely bay."

"Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose."

"For beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne: The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there; That music, remote, forlorn."

"‘What is the world, O soldiers? It is I, I, this incessant snow, This northern sky."

"A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast sorrow was there— The sweet cheat gone."

"Do diddle di do, Poor Jim Jay Got stuck fast In Yesterday."

"‘Who knocks?’ ‘I, who was beautiful, Beyond all dreams to restore, I from the roots of the dark thorn am hither, And knock on the door.’"

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

"Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she; I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country."

"But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare—rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?"

"Three jolly huntsmen, In coats of red, Rode their horses Up to bed."

"Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour—let no night Seal thy sense in deathly slumber Till to delight Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing."

""Is anybody there?" said the Traveler, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest's ferny floor."

"Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon."

"A harvest mouse goes scampering by, With silver claws and silver eye; And moveless fish in the water gleam, By silver reeds in a silver stream."

"Bang! Now the animal Is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, Eat or sleep or drink again, oh, what fun!"

"One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential."

"On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away."

"To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal."

"The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets and hangings from the draper, the information takes on something from the theme of the novel itself: the material is a symbol of the exotic, and the exotic feeds the Romantic appetite. It will lead to satiety, bankruptcy and eventually to nihilism and the final drive towards death and nothingness."

"Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time."

"Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough."

"There is more magic in sin if it is not committed."

"In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldn't last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young."

"The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature."

"How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit."

"Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America."

"Mass society destroys the things it is told are its inheritance. It is rarely possible to see the Abbey without being surrounded by thousands of tourists from all over the world. Like St. Peter's at Rome, it has been turned into a sinister sort of railway terminal. The aisles are as crowded as the pavements of Oxford Street or the alleys of a large shop, imagination is jostled, awe dispersed, and the mind never at rest. All great things, in our time, can only be seen in fragments, by fragmentary people."

"Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game."

"The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it."

"Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere."