Edna St. Vincent Millay > Quotes

“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing,
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“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.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“After all my erstwhile dear, my no longer cherished;
Need we say it was not love, just because it perished? ”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.

Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.

If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.

Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,
I shall have only good to say of you.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

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!”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“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 cannot 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.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. ”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Dirge Without Music"

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I love humanity but I hate people.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“What should I be
but just what I am?”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“pity me that the heart is slow to learn what the swift mind beholds at every turn.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.

Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,--
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Music, my rampart and my only one.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Beauty is whatever gives joy.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“There is no shelter in you anywhere.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. (in a letter written while she was in college)”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“So up I got in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad.
And, "One thing there's no getting by --
I've been a wicked girl," said I;
But if I can't be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“There is no God.
But it does not matter.
Man is enough.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“She is happy where she lies
With the dust upon her eyes.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry

“I would blossom if I were a rose.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Lamp and the Bell

“And what are you that, missing you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?

I know a man that’s a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?

Yet women’s ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell,—
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
She really used to think that way.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“Lost in Hell,-Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee;
Say to her, "My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“Song of a Second April

APRIL this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
From orchards near and far away
The gray wood-pecker taps and bores,
And men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep;
Noisy and swift the small brooks run.
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun
Pensively; only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“No one but Night, with tears on her dark face, watches beside me in this windy place.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast;
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I'll make you little jackets;
I'll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There'll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“That which has quelled me, lives with me, Accomplice in catastrophe.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“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.
”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“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.
”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence and Other Poems

“Stranger, pause and look;
From the dust of ages
Lift this little book,
Turn the tattered pages,
Read me, do not let me die!
Search the fading letters finding
Steadfast in the broken binding
All that once was I!”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“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?”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry

“We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. ”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind...”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay