AMY LOWELL

Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.

Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.

All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.

You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.

Youth condemns; maturity condones.

Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.

I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.

Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

Oh! To be a butterfly Still, upon a flower, Winking with its painted wings, Happy in the hour.

Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know.

A black cat among roses, phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon, the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still. It is dazed with moonlight, contented with perfume.

Can you see through the night, woman, that you stare so upon it? Man, what sparks do your eyes follow in the smouldering darkness?

Rapture's self is three parts sorrow.

All recurring joy is pain refined.

I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.

Even pain pricks to livelier living.

Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses All bent upon killing, because their "of courses" Are not quite the same.

I should like to bring a case to trial: Prosperity versus Beauty, Cash registers teetering in a balance against the comfort of the soul.