39 quotes
Every wish
Is like a prayer—with God.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
I think it frets the saints in heaven to see
How many desolate creatures on the earth
Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship
And social comfort, in a hospital.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
Let no one till his death
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work
Until the day's out and the labour done.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in't.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
Good critics, who have stamped out poets' hope,
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state,
Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male,
Stands single in responsible act and thought,
As also in birth and death.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
Capacity for joy
Admits temptation.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
That he, in his developed manhood, stood
A little sunburnt by the glare of life;
While I... it seemed no sun had shone on me.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushed toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art's life—and where we live, we suffer and toil.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
I would not be a rose upon the wall
A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
To say to a courtier, "Pluck that rose for me,
It's prettier than the rest." O Romney Leigh!
I'd rather far be trodden by his foot,
Than lie in a great queen's bosom.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Whoso loves
Believes the impossible.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
If the day's work is scant,
Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;
And, in that we have nobly striven at least,
Deal with us nobly, women though we be,
And honour us with truth if not with praise.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Of writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,—
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
If I married him,
I would not dare to call my soul my own,
Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought
And every heart-beat down there in the bill,–
Not one found honestly deductible
From any use that pleased him!
Aurora Leigh (1857)
Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–'
'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief)
'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just);
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits—so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth—
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
Aurora Leigh (1856)