Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

Winds and waters keepA hush more dead than any sleep.

Breathe soft, ye winds! ye waves, in silence sleep!

I love silence. But I usually only listen to that when I'm sleeping.

Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow.

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.

I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest!

One of the best things to do sometimes is simply to be.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing - just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park?

At home, I love reaching out into that absolute silence, when you can hear the owl or the wind.

But I try to steal other moments. Sometimes I get up very early in the morning and enjoy a quiet house and cup of tea before the craziness begins. Other times, I'll take a quick walk on the beach. You can find peace in a few minutes.

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.

I am a glutton for tranquility.

There are two places where I can completely relax: in nature and by the piano.

repose, v.i. To cease from troubling.

I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, The air was cooling, and so very still, That the sweet buds which with a modest pride Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems, Had not yet lost those starry diadems Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.

Seek out a tree and let it teach you stillness.

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

Rest and be thankful.

I often paint tranquility. If you stop thinking and rest, then a little happiness comes into your mind. At perfect rest you are comfortable.