21 Louis MacNeice Quotes

Louis MacNeice quotes

1. It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky, All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

2. 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.

3. Some on commission, some for the love of learning, Some because they have nothing better to do Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden The drumming of the demon in their ears.

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

5. 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 beyond me, My life when they murder by means of my Hands, my death when they live me.

6. O early one morning I walked out like Agag, Early one morning to walk through the fire Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire.

7. At which there arose from a wound in the asphalt, His big wig a-smoulder, Sir Christopher Wren Saying: 'Let them make hay of the streets of Laredo; When your ground-rent expire I will build them again.' Then twangling their bibles with wrath in their nostrils From Bonehill Fields came Bunyan and Blake: 'Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen; Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake.'

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

2. Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.

3. Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go.

4. 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?

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

6. 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.

7. Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.

8. Dublin was a glorious name in our family and had pleasurable associations of violence …Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than in any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me … it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel – which I quite like too.

9. 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.

10. There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. And I envy the intransigence of my own Countrymen who shoot to kill and never See the victim's face become their own Or find his motive sabotage their motives.