Louis MacNeice Quotes

Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with one pulse.

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.

Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

It's no go the merry-go-round, it's no go the rickshaw All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.

The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold

Down the road someone is practicing scales, The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails

Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go.

A pharaoh's profile, a Krishna's grace, tail like a question mark.

blind wantons like the gulls who scream And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural.

None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives. Are self deceivers, but the worst of all Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy' And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.

September has come, it is hers Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

All that I would like to be is human, having a share in a civilized, articulate and well-adjusted community where the mind is given its due but the body is not distrusted

Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than in any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. But, as with Belfast it took me years to penetrate its outer ugliness and dourness, so with Dublin it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium, It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums. It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save--as you prefer--the King or Ireland. The land of scholars and saints: Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush, Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints

A city built upon mud; A culture built upon profit; Free speech nipped in the bud, The minority always guilty. Why should I want to go back To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

Why do we like being Irish? Partly because It gives us a hold on the sentimental English As members of a world that never was, Baptized with fairy water

I was the rector's son, born to the anglican order, Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor; The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

I am not yet born; Forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words When they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, My treason engendered by traitors beyound me, My life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.

You know the worst: your wills are fickle, Your values blurred, your hearts impure And your past life a ruined church-- But let your poison be your cure.