14 quotes
Comedy is an escape, not from the truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.
Where in this small-talking world can I find
A longitude with no platitude?
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
The moon is nothing
But a circumambulating aphrodisiac
Divinely subsidized to provoke the world
Into a rising birth-rate.
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
I hear
A gay modulating anguish, rather like music.
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
The Great Bear is looking so geometrical
One would think that something or other could be proved.
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
The best
Thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in
Look as much like home as we can.
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
What is official
Is incontestable. It undercuts
The problematical world and sells us life
At a discount.
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
What after all
Is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
Try thinking of love, or something.
Amor vincit insomnia.
A Sleep of Prisoners (1951)
I tell you,
Miss, I knows an undesirable character
When I see one; I've been one myself for years.
Venus Observed (1950)
I travel light; as light,
That is, as a man can travel who will
Still carry his body around because
Of its sentimental value.
The Lady's Not for Burning (1949)
I hope
I've done nothing so monosyllabic as to cheat,
A spade is never so merely a spade as the word
Spade would imply.
Venus Observed (1950)
Coffee in England is just toasted milk.
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.