Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Edna St. Vincent Millay shares lyrical, grand musings on silence, truth, and freedom that linger like a candle's glow.

16 quotes

1. The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky, - No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat - the sky Will cave in on him by and by.

2. My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends - It gives a lovely light.

3. Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing.

4. Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

5. To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough.

6. Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

7. There are a hundred places where I fear To go, --so with his memory they brim! And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, 'There is no memory of him here!' And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

8. The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief or grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,—it must have been Very pretty.

9. A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?

10. She is happy where she lies With the dust upon her eyes.

11. And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

12. Oh, children, growing up to be Adventurers into sophistry, Forbear, forbear to be of those That read the rood to learn the rose.

13. After the feet of beauty fly my own.

14. Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing, sometimes, is better.

15. pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.

16. Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here For age to invest in compromise and fear.