Walter de La Mare Quotes

All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.

What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.

As long as I live I shall always be My Self - and no other, Just me.

Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business... Illumined by the imagination, our life, whatever its defeats - is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.

An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.

Slowly, silently, now the moon Walks the night in her silver shoon.

Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.

For beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne: The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there; That music, remote, forlorn.

Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.

Look thy last on all things lovely, Every hour

After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts - like a Chinese nest of boxes - oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front - in our ancestors, back and back until.

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation where Life has but one dark end.

Hi! handsome hunting man Fire your little gun. Bang! Now the animal is dead and dumb and done. Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again, Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!

What lovely things Thy hand hath made.

So, blind to Someone I must be.

When I lie where shades of darkness Shall no more assail mine eyes.

He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.

Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever - even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body

As soon as they're out of your sight, you are out of their mind.

A lost but happy dream may shed its light upon our waking hours, and the whole day may be infected with the gloom of a dreary or sorrowful one; yet of neither may we be able to recover a trace.

Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.

God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.

When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, And all her lovelier things even lovelier grow; Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies. When music sounds, out of the water rise Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes, Rapt in strange dream burns each enchanted face, With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place. When music sounds, all that I was I am Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came; And from Time's woods break into distant song The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.