The Oxford dictionary of modern quotations (46 page)

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

Last Poems (1922) no. 9

But men at whiles are sober

And think by fits and starts,

And if they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.

Last Poems (1922) no. 10

The laws of God, the laws of man,

He may keep that will and can;

Not I: let God and man decree

Laws for themselves and not for me;

And if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs.

Last Poems (1922) no. 12

And how am I to face the odds

Of man's bedevilment and God's?

I, a stranger and afraid

In a world I never made.

Last Poems (1922) no. 12

The candles burn their sockets,

The blinds let through the day,

The young man feels his pockets

And wonders what's to pay.

Last Poems (1922) no. 21

To think that two and two are four

And neither five nor three

The heart of man has long been sore

And long 'tis like to be.

Last Poems (1922) no. 35

These, in the day when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth's foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling

And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

They stood, and earth's foundations stay;

What God abandoned, these defended,

And saved the sum of things for pay.

Last Poems (1922) no. 37

For nature, heartless, witless nature,

Will neither care nor know

What stranger's feet may find the meadow

And trespass there and go,

Nor ask amid the dews of morning

If they are mine or no.

Last Poems (1922) no. 40

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch

over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my

skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act....The seat of this

sensation is the pit of the stomach.

Lecture at Cambridge, 9 May 1933, The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933)

p. 47

The rainy Pleiads wester,

Orion plunges prone,

The stroke of midnight ceases,

And I lie down alone.

More Poems (1936) no. 11

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;

But young men think it is, and we were young.

More Poems (1936) no. 36

Good-night. Ensured release

Imperishable peace,

Have these for yours,

While earth's foundations stand

And sky and sea and land

And heaven endures.

More Poems (1936) no. 48 "Alta Quies"

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 2

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;

Breath's a ware that will not keep.

Up, lad: when the journey's over

There'll be time enough to sleep.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 4

And naked to the hangman's noose

The morning clocks will ring

A neck God made for other use

Than strangling in a string.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 9

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard a wise man say,

"Give crowns and pounds and guineas

But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies,

But keep your fancy free."

But I was one-and-twenty,

No use to talk to me.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 13

Oh, when I was in love with you,

Then I was clean and brave,

And miles around the wonder grew

How well I did behave.

And now the fancy passes by,

And nothing will remain,

And miles around they'll say that I

Am quite myself again.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 18

In summertime on Bredon

The bells they sound so clear;

Round both the shires they ring them

In steeples far and near,

A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning

My love and I would lie,

And see the coloured counties,

And hear the larks so high

About us in the sky.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 21

"Come all to church, good people,"--

Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;

I hear you, I will come.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 21

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,

There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,

The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,

And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 23

Is my team ploughing,

That I was used to drive

And hear the harness jingle

When I was man alive?

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 27

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;

His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;

The wind it plies the saplings double,

And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 31

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:

To-day the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 31

From far, from eve and morning

And yon twelve-winded sky,

The stuff of life to knit me

Blew hither: here am I.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 32

Speak now, and I will answer;

How shall I help you, say;

Ere to the wind's twelve quarters

I take my endless way.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 32

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 40

And bound for the same bourn as I,

On every road I wandered by,

Trod beside me, close and dear,

The beautiful and death-struck year.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 41

Clunton and Clunbury,

Clungunford and Clun,

Are the quietest places

Under the sun.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 50, epigraph

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 54

Say, for what were hop-yards meant,

Or why was Burton built on Trent?

Oh many a peer of England brews

Livelier liquor than the Muse,

And malt does more than Milton can

To justify God's ways to man.

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink

For fellows whom it hurts to think.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 62

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair

And left my necktie God knows where,

And carried half-way home, or near,

Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer

Then the world seemed none so bad,

And I myself a sterling lad;

And down in lovely muck I've lain,

Happy till I woke again.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 62

I tell the tale that I heard told.

Mithridates, he died old.

Shropshire Lad (1896) no. 62

8.84 Sidney Howard =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

See Margaret Mitchell (13.105)

8.85 Elbert Hubbard =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1859-1915

Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not

believe you anyway.

Motto Book (1907) p. 31

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Philistine Dec. 1909, p. 32. The saying is often attributed to Frank Ward

O'Malley

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate

the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Roycroft Dictionary (1914) p. 46

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the

commonplace.

Thousand and One Epigrams (1911) p. 133

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the

work of one extraordinary man.

Thousand and One Epigrams (1911) p. 151

8.86 Frank McKinney ('Kin') Hubbard =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1868-1930

Classic music is th'kind that we keep thinkin'll turn into a tune.

Comments of Abe Martin and His Neighbors (1923)

It's no disgrace t'be poor, but it might as well be.

Short Furrows (1911) p. 42

8.87 L. Ron Hubbard =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1911-1986

Hubbard...told us that writing science fiction for about a penny a word

was no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, he

said, the quickest way is to start your own religion.

Sam Moscowitz recalling Hubbard speaking to the Eastern Science Fiction

Association at Newark, New Jersey, in 1947, in B. Corydon and L. Ron

Hubbard Jr. L. Ron Hubbard (1987) ch. 3

8.88 Howard Hughes Jr. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1905-1976

That man's ears make him look like a taxi-cab with both doors open.

In Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg Celluloid Muse (1969) p. 156

(describing Clark Gable)

8.89 Jimmy Hughes and Frank Lake =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Bless 'em all! Bless 'em all!

The long and the short and the tall.

Bless 'Em All (1940 song)

8.90 Langston Hughes =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1902-1967

"It's powerful," he said.

"What?"

"That one drop of Negro blood--because just one drop of black blood

makes a man coloured. One drop--you are a Negro!"

Simple Takes a Wife (1953) p. 85

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes.

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow

I'll sit at the table

When company comes

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen"

Then.

Besides, they'll see how

beautiful I am

And be ashamed,--

I, too, am America.

Survey Graphic Mar. 1925, "I, Too"

8.91 Ted Hughes =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1930-

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot.

Lupercal (1960) "Hawk Roosting"

8.92 Josephine Hull =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

?1886-1957

[Josephine Hull's] stage reminiscences are not the least of her charms.

"Shakespeare," she recalls, "is so tiring. You never get a chance to sit

down unless you're a king."

Time 16 Nov. 1953, p. 90

8.93 Hubert Humphrey =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1911-1978

There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to

enforce a law not supported by the people.

Speech at Williamsburg, 1 May 1965, in New York Times 2 May 1965, sec. 1,

p. 34

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken

seriously.

Speech to National Student Association at Madison, 23 Aug. 1965, in New

York Times 24 Aug. 1965, p. 12

And here we are, just as we ought to be, here we are, the people, here we

are in a spirit of dedication, here we are the way politics ought to be in

America, the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the

politics of joy.

Speech in Washington, 27 Apr. 1968, in New York Times 28 Apr. 1968, p. 66

8.94 Herman Hupfeld =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1894-1951

You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss,

A sigh is just a sigh;

The fundamental things apply,

As time goes by.

As Time Goes By (1931 song)

8.95 Aldous Huxley =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

1894-1963

Christlike in my behaviour,

Like every good believer,

I imitate the Saviour,

And cultivate a beaver.

Antic Hay (1923) ch. 4

There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in

provincialism.

Antic Hay (1923) ch. 10

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of

the country in which the office is held.

Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) p. 34

The sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon.

Brave New World (1932) ch. 5

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most

important of all the lessons that history has to teach.