89 quotes
Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
New beginnings and new shoots
Spring again from hidden roots
Pull or stab or cut or burn,
Love must ever yet return.
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)
The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their heart's desire...
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943)
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
Trench stinks of shallow buried dead
Where Tom stands at the periscope,
Tired out. After nine months he’s shed
All fear, all faith, all hate, all hope.
Through the Periscope (1915)
Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
Down on his knees he sinks, the stiff-necked King,
Stoops and kneels and grovels, chin to the mud.
Country Sentiment (1920)
Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seems to have failed after Loos.
Goodbye to All That (1929)
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.
Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
As you are woman, so be lovely:
As you are lovely, so be various,
Merciful as constant, constant as various,
So be mine, as I yours for ever.
The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all's poetry with him.
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)
The chief trouble with the official style is that it spreads far beyond the formal contexts to which it is suited. Most civil servants, having learned to write in this way, cannot throw off the habit.
The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943)
He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.
I, Claudius (1934)
War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air.
Where is good English to be found? Not among those who might be expected to write well professionally.
The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943)