Arthur Quiller-Couch Quotes
d. 1944 England
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (21 November 1863 – 12 May 1944) was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q.
Random Arthur Quiller-Couch quote
9 quotes
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
All the old statues of Victory have wings: but Grief has no wings. She is the unwelcome lodger that squats on the hearthstone between us and the fire and will not move or be dislodged.
O pastoral heart of England! like a psalm
Of green days telling with a quiet beat.
Not as we wanted it,
But as God granted it.
Only the heel
Of splendid steel
Shall stand secure on sliding fate,
When golden navies weep their freight.
O, that I were where I would be,
Then would I be where I am not;
For where I am I would not be,
And where I would be I can not.
The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite.
The reader, turning the pages of this book, will find this note of valiancy—of the old Roman ‘virtue’ mated with cheerfulness—dominant throughout, if in many curious moods. He may trace it back, if he care, far behind Chaucer to the rudest beginnings of English Song. It Is indigenous, proper to our native spirit, and it will endure.
I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation.